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Path Analysis in Google Analytics with Flow Visualization

2011-10-19T17:33:08Z

Google Recently announced a new feature in Google Analytics, Flow Visualization. These reports, the Visit Flow report, Navigation Flow report, and Goal Flow report are a new take on analyzing how people navigate through content.

Flow Visualization report in Google Anlaytics

For a long time click path analysis was not really possible in Google Analytics. Sure, we had the Navigation Summary and Entrance Paths reports, but these were very limited. This was by design. Most click path reports, no matter the analytics tool, has little to no value. They usually show 9,845 different paths to conversion. How does that help?

The new Flow Visualizations reports hope to remedy this problem and make it easier to understand visitor behavior regarding how they move through content.

Nodes: Foundation of Flow Visualizations

All flow visualization reports are built using nodes. Nodes are groups of pages. The cool thing is that the nodes are automatically created using an intelligence algorithm. For example, nodes will automatically group the same page that may only differ by a couple of query parameter.

Don’t worry, you can create your own nodes, and I’ll show you how to do that in a minute.

The new reports show visitor flow through nodes, and where people drop out of the flow (ie leave the site). The really important thing here is the visualization AND our ability to manipulate the visualization. So if you a specific issue or scenario that you are analyzing it’s easy to drill down on the scenario you want. But the visualization also supports ad-hoc analysis.

These new reports are in the Home > Intelligence > Flow Visualization section.

On to the Visits Flow report.

Visit Flow Report

The Visit Flow report is a nice refresh of the traditional click path report. Rather than looking at clicks from one page to another, we’re seeing visitors moving between nodes. The ‘story’ starts on the left side of the visualization where you can choose a to view a starting segment, like Campaign, Traffic Source, Country, Region, etc.

This is AMAZING! Now you can easily segment traffic through a site based on various dimensions of data! The next time someone asks what campaign traffic did, now you can provide some very detailed flow information.

Connections in blue represent the number of visits that move between the nodes.

Connections in red represent the drop off from a particular node.

How easy is that to understand? The brilliance is the simplicity.

Let’s say you want to focus on a particular segment of data, like the state of Texas. Just choose a dimension from the drop down, in this case Region. Then click on the Texas node at the far left and choose ‘Highlight traffic through here’. The path of traffic from Texas will appear a bit darker.

View the path for a specific dimension of data in the Flow Visualization report.

I know there can be a lot to take in. If you are a bit confused, then perhaps we should reduce the number of paths that are visible. Use the ‘Connections’ slider at the top to view more, or less paths and make the analysis easier.

Alter the number of paths visible in Flow visualization

The reason why click path reporting has sucked for SO LONG was the vast amount of data stuffed into a really crappy display. Google is trying to solve that using this new visualization, the Dimension drop down AND the Connections slider. You have control over the amount of data you are looking thus making analysis area.

Using this interface you can identify where people come from, follow them to various pages and evaluate the bounce rate, and then see what they look at after the landing page.

The interactivity is just awesome.

[ By the way, you can scroll to the right by dragging the visualization when you see the fist. You can also add more steps by clicking on the arrow at the far right. ]

Let’s say you want to learn more about a particular node. Just hover over a node and you’ll see something like this:

Node details in Google Analytics Flow Visualization

The first thing we learn is how many pages are in this node. Remember, an algorithm initially created this node. We can also see how many dropped off and how many moved on. Very useful.

Now, perhaps I want to understand this page a little better. I can click on the node and choose ‘Explore Traffic through here.’ That brings us to the next report

Navigation Flow Report

The Navigation Flow report is similar to the old Navigation Path report in Google Analytics. Now you can see the nodes before, and after, your chosen node.

Google Analytics Flow Navigation Report

Let’s talk about how we can create and edit your nodes.

Click on the small gear at the top of the node. You can use a reg ex, or other basic pattern, to group a set of pages together into a node.

For example, if I’m a publisher, I may want to group all my Sports pages together into a Sports node, like this:

The Name field is the name that will be displayed in the report, it’s nice and human readable :)

The value here is you can group your content together so you can analyze your site your way.

Ecommerce people, want to understand the flow of traffic through your product pages? Group them together in a node.

Publishers people, want to see where people go after the last page in all your articles? Group those pages together in a node.

Another really cool feature of the Flow Visualization reports is our ability to segment the entire graphic. Use the drop down at the top of the report to apply a segment, like new visits, return visits, etc.

Apply a segment to a Flow Visualization

Combine that with the dimension drop down and I can slice and dice the behavior of different groups as they move around the site. Crazy awesome.

Goal Flow Analysis

In addition to the basic flow reporting, there is also a Goal Flow report that provides insight into your conversion paths.

Goal Flow report in Google Analytics. Click to enlarge.

Again, you can choose a dimension of data, here I chose the medium, and view how that traffic moved through your funnels. I hope you have a funnel configured!

NOTE: At this time the Goal Flow report only works for URL based goals and funnels. Events will follow soon.

Notice the loops? Those show traffic that ‘loops back’ to other steps. I think this is a HUGE improvement over the existing Goal Funnel reports. It’s much easier to see holes in the funnel (drop offs) and behavior (looping).

Is this just the beginning?

Hopefully this gives you a basic idea of how the flow visualization reports work and how you can manipulate them. The key here is that you can segment the data to isolate the behavior that you want to investigate.

I’ve got to say, I think this is going to have a much bigger impact on Google Analytics than most people know. Sure, these reports are sexy. And we’ll start to do more path analysis.

But this visualization of data is the key change. I believe we’re going to see Google include more creative data visualizations to help aid analysis. That’s truly exciting.

Path Analysis in Google Analytics with Flow Visualization is a post from: Analytics Talk by Justin Cutroni

Get Exposed! Deep Content Marketing Optimization Tips from #SESSF

2011-08-19T00:44:38Z

Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of #SES San Francisco! A true content wizard, Lee Odden’s (@leeodden) Content Marketing Optimization session reminded the audience that content can make or break your website. When you’re looking to optimize your site, you have to take everything from rich media to web pages to digital assets to PDF documents to both created and shared content into account. Always remember: “If it’s searchable, it’s optimizable.”

With so many people looking to break into the already well-established online marketing realm, brand marketers have to go after the Holy Grail of content marketing optimization – that is to say, they must be efficient and improve the impact of their SEO and social media efforts. aimClear live-tweeted this session via @ericasendros Keep on reading for the real deal.

What does content marketing do for SEO? And where does it fit within an online marketing program? As content marketers, we create messages that are easily discoverable and share the content with people we connect with. Everything you create within your social network qualifies as content, and this applies to brands as well. As more companies adopt the brand as publisher, we see an increase in social content creation. The competitive landscape in search is leading to companies beginning to to expand their content circles to new types of media – everything from webinars to white papers to blogs to case studies. People want their data in a variety of ways, and it’s imperative to utilize every avenue of media that you can if you want to reach a wider audience. Create videos and write articles, guest blog, reach out to other thought-leaders to have them guest blog on your own site. Be proactive. Optimize all your content.

Sage Advice from a Master of the Online Marketing Craft
If you are a content creator searching for success, there are two things you must do:

Make your content findable
Make your content sharable

If nothing else, people need to be able to see what it is you’re trying to share. By spreading optimized content across various types of media, they will be able to find it in more place than one, thus increasing the chances they will share your content. Content marketing is basically just aligning customers’ needs with a brand’s objective.

How do you even get started writing your content? Lee suggests looking at segmentation of different customer groups as well as personas. What groups do your customers fall into? Find out and cater your content to them.

One Large Cup of Fresh Content, Please
The most effective SEO tactic is to have good content, but that’s also the most difficult to maintain. Creating new, fresh ideas on a regular basis (and optimizing them) is what makes a brand climb to the top of the search engine results.

If you want to write quality content, you need to have a process – a cyclical relationship with the community so you can have new and original ideas everyday. Reward your community for sharing, and they will continue to share. People like nothing better than to be recognized for their ideas, and by keeping your community happy, you’ll be opening the doors for more people to share content and original thoughts with you.

Companies should create content that can be optimized. Why go through the trouble of writing a thoughtful piece or shooting an informational video if you’re not going to optimize it? If you’e not going to optimize it, chances are it won’t be easily findable. Expending significant time on content should be rewarded with optimization. Generally, most of the head honchos in a company think they need to optimize their products or services first because that will ultimately result in more sales. This is certainly true, but what many managers fail to realize is how important it is for news, press releases and general information to be optimized. A customer is more likely to find your company or your product if your entire website is in keen optimization mode. There is a tremendous opportunity for SEOs to work with PR people, industry analysts and bloggers.

At Your Service, Dear Customer!
People are always searching Google for forums that will provide an answer to their question. Increase customer satisfaction by making their answer readily available, optimized, and easily navigable. Remember: Whatever can be searched can be optimized. Everything from images to video to tweets to Facebook updates to LinkedIn updates and Microsoft Office documents. These media types can be ranked on their own, but optimizing them makes them more findable. If it’s more findable, that’s less work for your customer.

Make sure that you master optimization for content across the customer’s buying cycle. What are you doing to optimize for customer experience?

Strategy, Strategy, Strategy!
After you have achieved the high quality content you want, you will need to work toward content marketing optimization and social media optimization. Here’s how:

Research customer segments.
Identify search keywords and social topics that are relevant to your customer needs.
Content and promotion plan:
- Where will you promote it?
- Where will you re-purpose it?
- Companies often publish their content only to never use it again.
- Plan how to re-use your content.
Optimize, socialize and promote your content. Grow your network everyday.
- Who do you follow and associate with?
- What are your customers content preferences?
- How do they discover, consume and share content?
- What are they looking for on search engines?
- Align your business goals with the needs of your consumer.

A lot of SEOs optimize existing content for particular phrases they think will be most searched. That’s not enough to create relationships with customers. Find out why your customers want that product. Harvest the dialogue, organize it by keywords, and answer their questions. Collect data, identify commonalities, and cluster common characteristics.

Where do we get the data? Ask customers! If you were to search for a product, where would you search? What would you search for?

Courtesy of freefoto.com

Some Questions Worth Asking… Yourself

Which phrases do competitors optimize?
What high level keywords do you want to be known for?
How will you promote that blog post?
Where will you re-purpose it?
What media will you include?
How can you make it interactive?
What are the top level concepts you want to dominate?
Is this piece of content useful and interesting?

Bottom Line: If You Create Good Stuff, People Will Share It
Press releases that have embedded media far exceed press releases that are comprised of text alone in performance. To achieve more coordinated content, use a mix of different media types to appease all customers. Contributed articles and guest blog posts can be useful, but how do you find a willing, well-respected guest blogger? It’s as simple as checking search results for guest bloggers and reaching out to them. Most bloggers will love the exposure, especially if the blog is the center of your site. Are you being creative with getting your content out there? Creating networks at the end of each distribution channel is important. Its not enough to provide optimized content.

So, you’re ready to apply content SEO. Now what?
Oftentimes, the most difficult part of kicking off an optimization project is knowing where to start. If you’re in that boat, try these practical tips:

Audit existing content and focus on current content and digital asset optimization.
Optimize priority content and add new content according to marketing/PR purposes following SEO best practices.
Re-vamp! Develop new site content and a new editorial plan while adding content according to keywords.

8 Ideas For Fresh Content
Tired of the same old content? Running low on fresh ideas? Need a new burst of energy? Try one of these eight tips Lee suggests:

Google alert keywords – provide commentary and insight.
Create short lists of tips according to keyword themes.
Compile large collections of resources according to theme. As you find things online, collect them and categorize them. Over time, you will accrue a substantial list.
Interview other bloggers. Either ask many bloggers one question or ask several questions to one blogger.
Aggregate the best comments from other blogs and turn that into your own analysis.
Run surveys, polls and contests that result in content. What did you discover?
Get your staff to ask you questions, and answer as a blog post. It’s a gold mine for coming up with content ideas!
Collect services/sales/FAQ information and then write about them.

Eureka! So THAT’s what they mean by content marketing optimization
Online competition is fierce. As marketers, we need to embrace our creativity and make it as accessible as possible. Let’s take the initiative to always remain one step ahead of our competitors. If your competition is performing, borrow their popularity by interacting in their conversation. After you’ve furiously produced some fresh, stimulating content and optimized it to Timbuktu, your competition will be the one trying to interact with you.

Remember what’s important! You have to be customer-centric, and you need a good team. Train your copywriters on SEO best practices, and go holistic with social and SEO. Likewise, you will need to train your SEOs on how to create an efficient content strategy. Lastly, don’t forget to set reasonable, adaptable goals and create feedback mechanisms to stay in contact with your customers and community.

Big thanks to Lee for an awesome session! Keep checking aimClear Blog for more conference coverage

YouTube Creator Playbook

2011-08-05T16:01:43Z

The guys at YouTube have created this handy how to guide for making the most of your online video.

Read it, it’s good!

9 Ways Your Business Needs To Change To Become Social

2011-08-16T13:00:56Z

Social media has changed the way we do almost everything. We make buying decisions, find jobs, play games, listen to music and learn socially. But for business it’s clearly been a more challenging shift. Engaging in social media requires a fundamental change to the way businesses function and think. No wonder so many are slow to embrace social media and devote budgets to it.

The challenge is that most businesses are stuck in traditional thinking and marketing that doesn’t translate well to a social atmosphere, on- or off-line. While many people are advocating the evolution of businesses to becoming, “social businesses,” few people are outlining specific changes that will help them.

Here are some ways traditional business need to evolve to become social:

1. The concept of an audience is outdated.

People are not out there with their hands in their laps listening intently as your company gives a speech, issues a press release or announces the new service you are excited about. They won’t wait for the 15-minute question and answer period at the end of that speech. They are commenting on your Facebook post on Saturday and looking for your answer to their tweet on Monday night. You may be able to start a conversation, but like real life conversations, you can’t be sure where it will end up. Your only hope is to develop a community and then behave in a way that respects the members. You’re going to live or die by that community.

2. Size (alone) does not matter.

Touting audience numbers is a holdover from the days when all businesses had to evaluate their advertising expenditures were magazine readership and Neilson T.V. viewership. The number of visitors, subscribers, likes and followers is not the most important fact. Anyone can get 15,000 Twitter followers. That’s why you see a Twitter handle with 300 followers that has a higher Klout score than one with twenty times that number. Your hundred thousand Facebook “likes” is irrelevant if no one comments or clicks on your links because your posts won’t be shown in anyone’s feeds. Even a million visitors isn’t really a big number if your bounce rate is 95%. Engagement is measurable and it’s far more important than the top line number. The difference between the top line number and engagement is the essence of what it means to be social.

3. Empa thy and caring trump strategy.

Strategy conjures up images of battle — you against the consumer. In the evolved, human form of marketing that is social media, empathy should inform the decisions you make. If you can empathize with the people you want to reach; if you can sense what they need, because you care about them, you’ll be better off than if you set out with the idea of making moves to force them into a position. How can you do that? They are talking to you and you are talking to them every day. You measure the results of the content you offer. You listen. The studied, carefully crafted approach may have worked 15 years ago but it is devoid the feeling that is part of social interactions.

4. You can’t get people’s attention with marketing messages.

Marketing messages fall on deaf ears. There’s just too much noise out there. No matter how nicely the message is wrapped up in a bow and placed on a blog or Facebook page, a marketing message is still a pitch, and people have become immune to the pitch. We earn the right to market in the context of a relationship that has been built over time. The most effective marketing doesn’t come from your business anyway. The most effective marketing happens when influential people choose to share your story. This concept may be well known but judging by the actual behavior of brands, it may be the last of the dinosaur ideas to become extinct.

5. Writing is more important than copywriting.

The goal of copywriting is to convince someone to take an action. Copywriting is a holdover from the days of broadcast style marketing. It aims to manipulate and drive people to act. Writing brings people into your world, tells your story, and engages them. Then they decide to act. Copywriters, please don’t take offense. Good copywriters are good writers. Even if you only have six words at your disposal, you should be writing. Hemingway famously told a story in six words: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” That’s not copywriting.

6. It’s personal.

Some individuals at your organization will need to come out from behind the corporate curtain and speak from the heart. People connect with people. People buy from people. Who at your company is going to get comfortable with that?

7. Speed matters. A lot.

Big corporations tend to move slowly. There are committees and meetings and chains of command. The legal department may want to get involved. This process only offers the illusion of control and is the kiss of death in social media. Solve this by creating social media guidelines and policies and carefully hiring and training customer facing employees. There is no time for bureacracy in social media.

8. Results require patience.

So, they may ask, where’s the bottom line here? If your company is used to measuring the results of a campaign, they may have to shift their thinking. Campaign thinking is antithetical to social media. You may have a campaign to bring more people to your Facebook page but it’s what happens with them over time that matters. Campaign thinking is short sighted. Social media is about creating relationships. Relationships and trust take time. You may have to act quickly on social media, but look to the longer timline to measure results.

9. Influence is the new power.

The old media had centralized power. They had the power to say, “No,” to your company’s article or press release. They had the power that came from being “it” for information. The new media has influence. A single mom blogger may only have 1,000 readers a month, but those readers check in every day, and they care deeply about the person blogging and what she thinks. When that little blogger expresses love for your product or concern about your product’s ingredients, she might be able to change the behavior of a large portion of her readers. Multiply that times thousands of mom bloggers –some with scores of thousands of readers. Of all the opportunities for brands to engage in social media, connecting with bloggers and building content-rich blogs to be the least universally adopted.

In this scene from Mad Men, replace the word “television” with “social media.” When Harry, a media buyer at the agency, tentatively proposes that there should be a department devoted to this up-and-coming new media form called television, Roger Cooper anoints him head of this new department of one. That seems to be where some companies are right now with social media. It’s hard to blame them. Who really wants to step whole-heartedly into something that will require them to change the entire way they do business?

Related Articles:

The Twenty One Rules of Engagement (Brian Solis)

Social Media Can Change The Corporate Culture (Mitch Joel, Six Pixels)

The 3 Teams You Need To Organize and Scale Social Media (Brass Tack Thinking)

Twitter’s t.co link shortening service is game changing – here’s why

2011-08-18T17:38:57Z

Yesterday the Distilled site received fewer direct visits than any Wednesday out of the last 6 months. What caused this dramatic drop in direct traffic? Did we screw something up? Was our site down or unavailable?

None of these things happened. What happened was Twitter rolled out their new t.co URL shortener. When I first heard that Twitter was doing this I must admit I didn’t really see what the big deal was and largely ignored the news. But let’s take a quick look at our analytics for the past month:

See how t.co is showing up as one of our referrers? What this effectively does is provide Twitter as a referral source. Which is huge. This is game changing!

I highly recommend that everyone reads the help page about t.co because Twitter are planning some interesting things such as:

Our link service will also be used to measure information like how many times a link has been clicked. This information will eventually become an important quality signal for our resonance algorithm, which determines how relevant and interesting each Tweet is when compared to similar Tweets.

Right now the t.co wrapper only appears for URLs longer than 20 characters so there are still some links not being wrapped in t.co but according to this dev blog post it will roll out eventually for all URLs.

Tracking Twitter Links in Analytics

Ok, let me recap – up until now we’ve had lousy tracking for Twitter traffic. The reason for this is that everyone lives in one of two places; either they use the web-client and are using http://twitter.com as their URL, or they use a desktop/mobile client (e.g. Tweetdeck/Hootsuite etc) that lives outside of the browser.

In the scenario where someone is using the web client your referral will show up as http://twitter.com as we can see here for referrals from the Twitter domain (with a handful of visits from an individual profile page):

In the scenario where someone is using a desktop/mobile Twitter client there will be no referral to the visit and your traffic will show up as direct.

Now, however – all links shared on Twitter get wrapped in a t.co URL and crucially this redirect passes a referrer of the t.co URL. So from the last few days here’s the breakdown of our analytics for t.co URLs:

I encourage you to try this our yourself – I wrote about some SEO bookmarklets on SEOmoz the other day and one of those is a bookmarklet to check referrer which is really handy for playing around with this stuff.

Why This is Game Changing

This is a genius move from Twitter. No longer do the masses have to rely on some wonky tracking system or matching bit.ly clicks to their analytics but instead you’ll start to see the value and impact of Twitter traffic directly within your stats. This is going to help justify the value of Twitter engagement for a whole lot of brands and business owners who previously wouldn’t have realised just how much traffic Twitter was sending.

One thing I especially like about this change is that you can now actually drill down and see the impact of individual tweets and check what happened in your analytics. For example let’s check what the top t.co referral was for distilled:

We can then go look this URL up in Twitter search like this:

So this is huge because now anyone can see the direct value of Twitter traffic in their analytics. As marketers we can report more easily on the impact of Twitter traffic without tagging URLs or using a 3rd party service.

Quickly lookup your t.co referrers with my bookmarklet

It’s still a slightly slow process to go and lookup these URLs via search so I made a bookmarklet that you can use to lookup your t.co links and open up the Twitter search page automatically. The bookmarklet works on both a single t.co page like this:

And on a list of referring t.co links like this:

Grab the bookmarklet here (drag and drop to your bookmarks bar):

t.co lookup bookmarklet

Note: Twitter search only goes back 7 days so only run this for fresh t.co URLs – anything further back won’t show anything in Twitter search

Warning: Don’t use this when you have more than 10 t.co URLs showing, otherwise it will try and open them all up and crash your browser

Twitter Should Make More Use of http://t.co

One final closing statement, if you go to t.co to try and understand what this is all about you get this:

What Twitter should really do is make this page all about Twitter tracking and explain to webmasters that they’re seeing this referral because they’ve been sent traffic from Twitter. It would drive education and help out less knowledgeable folks who see t.co in their referrals without knowing what it is.

Tom Critchlow Tom Critchlow is VP Operations for the NYC office, living in Brooklyn and working in Manhattan. Fiercely curious about most things and passionate about everything.

Follow @tomcritchlow

Tom Critchlow

Guide to Setting up Advanced Segments in Google Analytics for Complex Brand Names

2011-08-05T14:31:59Z

Posted by Stephen

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

This is a step by step guide to setting up Brand and Non Brand keyword segments for a complex brand – when you have multiple brand keywords and where your brand keywords mirror your non brand keywords.

I have used the example of a client with a number of sub brands to demonstrate. Pay attention to the difference between AND and OR statements in the examples. As a non-developer, I find them to be tricky little weasels. There are four parts to the process:

Choose the right brand keywords
Set up a custom segment for brand keywords
Set up a custom segment for non-brand keywords
Check that your segment numbers add up

1. Choose the right brand keywords

The process of setting up brand keywords is straightforward when you have a single obvious brand name, but there is more subtlety required in choosing keywords in more complex situations. For a client such as alh.hr with a range of hotels in Dubrovnik, Croatia, where hotels have names such as "Hotel Dubrovnik Palace" which mirror the non-brand search term "hotel Dubrovnik", we have to extract just the unique part of the brand name and use it as the brand keyword. So from their Global Brand and list of Hotel names

Adriatic Luxury Hotels (ALH)
Hotel Excelsior Dubrovnik
Hotel Dubrovnik Palace
Hotel Bellevue Dubrovnik
Hotel Kompas Dubrovnik
Grand Hotel Bonavia Rijeka
Villa Agave

I extract the terms Excelsior, Palace, Bellevue, Kompas, Bonavia and Agave. I add to this list their global brand name ALH and its full written name Adriatic Luxury Hotels. Sometimes you need to make trade-offs based on searcher intent. You will note that Adriatic Luxury Hotels can be both a brand and non-brand keyword and we need to make a decision on how to classify this. I believe that keeping it as a brand keyword is the alternative most reflective of searcher intent and we will have to live with the few who use it as a non-brand keyword. We now have eight brand keywords to set up in our segments.

2. Setting up a custom segment for Brand keywords

In Google Analytics, click on the "All visits" drop down to access advanced segments
Click "create a new advanced segment"

Search for "keyword" in the box
Drag and drop the green keyword field from the left into the right hand side box

Set condition to contains
Add the brand keyword as a value
Add all brand keywords similarly with OR statements
Add an AND statement
Search for "medium" in the box
Drag and drop the green medium field from the left into the right hand side box
Set condition to matches exactly
Add organic as the value
Add and OR statement
Search for "medium" in the box
Drag and drop the green medium field from the left into the right hand side box
Set condition to matches exactly
Add cpc as the value
Name your segment – Brand Keywords
Test your segment by clicking the test segment button

It should look like something like this:

3. Setting up a custom segment for Non Brand keywords:

In Google Analytics, click on the "All visits" drop down to access advanced segments
Click "create a new advanced segment"

Search for "keyword" in the box
Drag and drop the green keyword field from the left into the right hand side box

Set condition to does not contain
Add the brand keyword as a value
Add all brand keywords similarly with AND statements
Add an AND statement
Search for "medium" in the box
Drag and drop the green medium field from the left into the right hand side box
Set condition to matches exactly
Add organic as the value
Add and OR statement
Search for "medium" in the box
Drag and drop the green medium field from the left into the right hand side box
Set condition to matches exactly
Add cpc as the value

It should look something like this

4. Check, double check and sense check your segments.

Experience has taught me to make sure my segments are correct before using them.

If you have created your segment as above, you should see this in you Custom Segments box

Do a sense check.

Number of brand keywords + number of non-brand keywords should = all keywords.

For ALH I found that keyword numbers didn't add up because people were searching in Croatian for the website and I hadn't included Croatian versions of the brand terms! I had to go back and put in Croatian language brand terms.

Check that values on a graph add up

Put both segments on and go to Traffic sources > Search engines. Scan a number of data points and make sure they add up. Simple.

Check that your actual keywords fall in the correct bucket.

Put both segments on and go to Traffic sources > Keywords. Scan a number of data points and make sure each keywords falls in the expected bucket.

These three very simple checks will save you a lot of headaches when working with advanced segments.

---------------------------------

This is my process when working with Brand segments, if you have other solutions please share them in the comments. I find this tricky to get my head around and would love some more tips

Note: You can only have a max of 20 AND or OR statements per segments and you can only have a max of 100 advanced segments per profile. You have the option in keywords "matches regular expressions" which can help you work around these limits.

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SEO 101: Quality Vs. Quantity of Links

2011-07-27T19:52:08Z

Quality vs. Quantity

In a world where everything can be found on the Internet, it is extremely important that people can find what they are looking for in the top results of a search engine. Search engine optimization, or SEO for short, is the process of improving the ranking of a website on a search engine, to move a site closer to the top of the results. Having people link to the site is a good way to get to the top of a search engine, but how do you get people to post quality links to your blog? The answer is quality posts and SEO techniques. SEO techniques can be classified into two broad categories: white hat and black hat.

White hat SEO methods conform to search engines’ guidelines, the main one being not deceiving the engine’s crawler. A good example of this is targeting your content at the reader, not the search engine. In addition, a post must be of good quality, this meaning the post must have something that is helpful, interesting, useful, original, or funny. If a post does not give the reader something useful, it is likely wasting their time and is probably of poor quality. Useful posts help obtain link authority. Link authority, as defined by http://www.internetintelligenceworks.com, is the “Authority for a website [that] is gained by a webpage, through quality, incoming links.” What does this mean? In short, it says the more good quality websites that have links to your site, the higher it will appear in search engines.

The number of links to your site does not necessarily matter. It is better to have a few quality links, than a large number of bad links that can bring your search rank down.

5 Steps to Determining Link Quality

To find out if a link is of acceptable quality, ask yourself these questions:

Does the site rank in search engines for its company name, website name and other simple, or obvious keywords found on its own homepage? If it does not, a link from this site may do more harm than good.
How does the site rank for the terms it is targeting? For example, let’s say the site is about Popsicles. Does the site show up in the top 20 for searches for Popsicles on the most popular search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo)? If so, it should boost your search engine rank.
Is the site linking to you indexed on the three major engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo)? Can it be found by searching for its domain? If the URL is not indexed, the link is not likely to be found by search engines and will not help your search rank.

Does the linking site have a positive Google PageRank? If you see green in the Google toolbar tool, it means the site has a positive page rank, white or grey means the site has a penalized or low page rank, which will eventually lower your page rank if linked to.
How are the other links on the site? Are the majority of the links on-topic, or are there links to completely unrelated topics such as dating, adult material, cash advances, etc.? Off-topic links should be avoided because they may cause the search rank to decrease in the future.

If you answered no to more than two of these questions, the link will probably be considered bad quality by a search engine.

Black hat SEO methods try to trick the search engines. These methods include, having hidden text that is either: the same color as the background, in a hidden div, or placed off screen. Websites found to be using black hat methods will have to face the consequences, which normally include removal from the search database or a reduced search rank. In February of 2006, BMW’s site was removed from Google’s search pages due to the use of black hat methods. Not too long after the removal, an apology to Google was made, and BMW appeared in the search results once again.

Quality Over Quantity

If more posts means more links, then a large quantity of small posts seems like the best way to attract more readers. At first, you may think it is easier and less time consuming, but in reality, it is more like to decrease your site’s search engine rank. A blog should be full of well-written posts, because poor quality posts can annoy readers. A blog full of unoriginal poorly written posts is less likely to get linked to, having a negative effect on its search engine rank. On the rare occasion a well-written post is made, it is less likely to get discovered because the rest the blog is “bringing it down.” You should be aiming for quality posts that will generate more links, and a better search rank.

The best form of SEO is creating great content. Posts that do not waste the reader’s time are more likely to get quality links even if a new post only appears one a week, or once every two weeks. Well-written posts cause search engine ranks to rise, resulting in more traffic. In the end, remember that quality is more important than quantity. As Steve Jobs once said, “One home run is much better than two doubles.”

SEO 101: Quality Vs. Quantity of Links is a post from: B2B Marketing and Lead Generation | Optify

The #1 Reason Your Customers Hate You on Facebook

2011-07-21T15:14:46Z

Your customers are going about their day. They’re working out (just kidding!) sitting on their couch watching TV, window shopping at the mall or they’re listening to their radio in the car. Suddenly, a voice interrupts their train of thought. It’s YOUR voice, the voice of your brand. They stop to listen because they recognize you – you’re their friend. The person they bought their car from, where they get their groceries, the band they’ve recently been turned on to. You spend a few seconds marketing talking to them and then you utter those four little words – “Find us on Facebook!” And they do.

But then something awful happens.

They begin to hate you. Passionately. You’re screwed.

What happened?

You sent your customers to Facebook and then didn’t give them anything. You focused on the tool, not the offer. Instead of telling your customers WHERE to go (Find us on Facebook! Follow us on FourSquare!), tell them WHY. Better yet, show them why.

It sounds like such an obvious thing, doesn’t it? We know that customers Like and follow brands because they want access to discounts and offers and exclusive content they can’t get anywhere else. They connect because they want something and they expect us to give them something.

But then we don’t.

Why not?

As a consumer, I’m often frustrated by this. A brand or, God forbid, a local restaurant will provide a social call-to-action telling me to “Like them on Facebook”. So I do. But then there’s nothing there waiting for me. There’s no tie-in. There’s no offer. There’s no why, only the what.

Facebook doesn’t work without the why.

But it isn’t just smaller brands, the big brands are just as guilty of it. I was catching up on some Modern Family last night when I saw Pepsi’s Santa Dancing commercial. It’s cute so I’ve embedded it below.

What the YouTube clip doesn’t show is at the end of the commercial there’s a social call to action written in the world’s tiniest font. It says “Like Us On Facebook”.

It doesn’t say why. It doesn’t say what’s there. It just says to do it. And when I get to Facebook, I get nothing from Pepsi. There’s no tie-in. There aren’t exclusive videos of more Santa dancing. I don’t get any secrets about why Santa prefers Pepsi to Coke when he’s on vacation. It’s like that commercial never happened. That experience never happened.

Fragmented social media doesn’t work. You have to give people something.

Depending on how many offline campaigns you’re running, you may not be able to incorporate every one of them into your online media efforts, but there needs to be a brand tie-in somewhere. Something more than just a daily list of random updates.

Disney gives it to me:

They give me the nostalgia for my childhood, the one that will encourage me to purchase their older movies and respark an interest in newer ones.

Bettie’s Cakes gives it to me

They taunt me the location of the truck and the flavors of the day. I can’t tell you how many times someone from Outspoken Media has gotten a hunger for cupcakes and tweeted the truck to come visit us. AND THEN IT DOES!

So does local Troy, NY pub, Browns Brewing, who syncs their email with its Facebook interaction.

The result? I know where I want to go to lunch today to cool down.

How do you avoid being a hated brand on Facebook?

Build the WHY into the platform: Stop treating social media as a knee jerk reaction, joining to join instead of with a clear purpose. Having a Facebook account is not social media. Understand your own WHY and how will use this platform before choosing a social network to participate in. Once you know your why, create your strategy whether its discounts, promotions, contests, humor, high-levels of engagement whatever. Whatever you choose should line up with your overall brand promise and should be something you can sustain long-term.
Build the WHY into your marketing: Once you commit to creating a Facebook presence, build it into your other online and offline marketing. Telling your customers to Like you on Facebook also isn’t social media. You need to tell them why to create that interest. If you have exclusive photos from a recent event – say that. If you have an interactive quiz for them to participate in – tell them that. Add these CTAs into your marketing so that your customers know that not only do you have a Facebook page, but there’s a reason for them to visit you and that there’s something to do once they get there. Asking people to Like you on Facebook doesn’t tell them why they should. You need to do that yourself.
Be social more than you market: You can market on social media. It’s fine. But you need to be social first. Your main objective is to create something that is compelling for your users. You come second.

We hate things that waste our time. Things that look to take from us, without giving us anything in return. If you’re running your Facebook marketing strategy without providing that WHY for your audience, you’re failing. You’re not on Facebook to scoop up fans for sport, asking them to Like you and then never speaking to them again. You’re there to build them, to keep them, and to give them something they can’t get anywhere else. You’re there to build the why into your brand. It’s a snowball effect. But before you can benefit, you have to build your hill.

What are you doing on Facebook to maintain your good status with customers?

The Heart Of SEO: 8 Everlasting Truths, Part 1

2011-07-11T17:02:11Z

I’ve recently had two transcendent experiences to further frame my now nearly 20-year career as an online marketer. First, I essentially stepped away from aimClear’s offices in Duluth and Saint Paul for 6 months to write a book about Facebook Ads. Then, literally as the book was completed, I had heart damage fixed. During cancer treatment over five years ago, my aortic valve was seriously impacted by chemo and radiation. Both the book project and open-heart surgery took me away from my decades-long daily study of SEO for weeks at a time. Both experiences turned out really well, were essential and deep, made aimClear an even better company, and provided me with magnificent perspective I would not have realized by other less extreme experiences.

Any CEO, whose company grows over five years from only him to approaching 20 souls, needs to trust the team. I knew aimClear was totally cool because now, these years later, we’ve got an office full of brilliant SEO brainy-types who practice state-of-the-art social, PR, SEO, PPC mashup strategies and tactics with vigor, wit and thought leadership. After each chunk of time away, the team briefed me so I never got personally very far out of sync with SEO changes. From daily vicissitudes in Facebook, YouTube template changes to Google’s +1, I asked for and received comprehensive studies from our team whenever anything important evolved. Still, being away from my beloved SEO study broke my heart. Well, it was broken already. The whole thing was very ironic.

Still, temporarily stepping aside made me a much better marketer. The unexpected silver lining was that constantly returning to SEO news tuned out to be a bit like perspective gained by a lonely parent who rediscovers his children after weeks away at summer vacation camp. Though I was (truly) stunned at how significantly SEO had changed each block of time away, not too much had changed at all.

In fact now that I think about it, not much has not changed at all since the days of “Fetch,” “Archie” and my hot little 14.4k Modem (V.32bis) (2400 baud) modem. Heck, not much of marketing’s essence has changed for hundreds of years. As I wrote Killer Facebook Ads, the book became much more about marketing, beyond just Facebook Ads. After completing the book, the sabbatical from the daily SEO grind to repair my heart gave me some unpressured time to assimilate things, to think and I felt inspired to see things clearer than before. SEO is ever new and barely ever changes. Long Live SEO! This is the first installment of two, the second half of which will be published later this week.

1. SEO Is About Operating On Brand Quality, Not Just Algorithmic Discoverability
Sure: tags, shares, CMS structure and links are critical, but it takes an awesome new product to overtake an established brand. Customers don’t buy tags and shares. They purchase products that work and services that solve needs. Links and shares come from creating wonderful products, promoting the products, and finding customers who care. Just because it’s “SEO” does not mean the fundamental precepts of marketing are any different then they have ever been. SEO is a marketing channel tactic, not a strategy.

Marketers like to get angry because search engines seem to give established brands big breaks. Yep, it sure is hard for new brands to break through. Dude, it should be that way. The reason search engines make it hard for new brands is because awesome new brands are actually pretty rare. Arguably, it should be hard to break through. It’s always been this way. I heard from my mentors that in 1965, as a ma’ and pa’ appliance shop, it was pretty darned hard to take on Sears®, selling washing machines and stoves in Minneapolis neighborhoods, too. Things really have not changed very much in the Internet age.

It’s just that now entitled SEO practitioners complain, spoiled by the long lost days when, for just a minute in history, mediocre products could win by algorithmic manipulation. You know what? Get over it!

The timeless marketing axiom is that you can’t wrap a turd up in a bow and expect customers to keep buying the product. Mastering the algorithm in any organic era or publishing environment won’t fix a terrible product, even after prominence is gained. Lies are discovered and half-truths backfire. Having access to a printing press, fax machine, email or Facebook Page could never help if the product sucks. The only real wealth to be gained is the creation of valuable brands, timing, hard work and luck. After these attributes, organic prominence comes next. “Real” SEO is about understanding the imperative need to nurture the evolution of brand equity based on marketplace feedback.

Yes, SEO is about discoverability without paying the engine, but sure-footed SEO marketing starts with having awesome products that customers want. Truly great marketers will be truly great in any era and transcend the channel of the day. A brand can buy any flavor-of-the-month channel distribution expertise. It’s much harder to develop fabulous ideas and differentiating creative concepts that highlight and flatter the true value that makes a brand, new or otherwise, a perfect match for the community’s needs.

2. SEO Without Research Is Like The Tin Man, A Body With No Heart
Content without understanding what customers want is a little like peeing in the wind with your eyes shut. It’s possible to thread the needle in a vacuum, but success without research seems to be very rare. The “caterer” who discovers the keyword “gourmet food delivery Manhattan” has found a market segment that is potentially product defining. The Facebook community manager who discovers 12,630 users who are fans of a certain complimentary website have a place to go, to hang out, network and make new friends.

In the old days we called hotel room gatherings to decide on logo colors, marketing message “focus groups,” and Neilson used survey books. Now, from search to social, we have more empirical methods to understand what customers want and what words they use to express certain things or intentions. It’s a fine new age of data-driven market research. Research is the all-knowing king and content is the all-powerful queen sitting equally at his side.

3. Great SEO Content Is The Natural Result Of Authentic Value
Now that “liking,” “sharing,” rebroadcasting and other social signals have joined links, semantics and trust as primary SEO elements, there’s a lot of talk amongst marketers that recurrent and brilliant content to traffic and promote is essential. As it happens, this reality has been the same for centuries.

Brands win when they start with the principle questions:

“What must we give our customers to demystify the process, preemptively remove barriers, and support the process of becoming and being our customers?”
“What can we leave behind for potential customers that will clearly incent them to return and buy?”
“Are we willing to give until it hurts?”
“Are we as marketers willing to create content that teaches customers to fish, without giving away the fish bucket?”
“How can we pay it forward with new customers to keep their faith and loyalty?”

These truths have nothing to do with SEO. Soft, magnanimous and benevolent touches are immortal when it comes to content.

4. Understanding Circulation Is Key
When it comes to the distribution of content, broadcast and rebroadcast, adopt early and adapt often. Distribution paradigms change daily. Present-day distribution networks, how they piggyback and dovetail, are the dominant concept to stay current with and master. Facing the brutal reality of what you do and don’t know about how content circulates amongst people is fundamental. This applies not only search engines themselves, but components of user behavior that search engines see as signals. Who saw tweets coming as important social signals to search engines? To those early adopters who invested time in building huge networks of authentic Twitter friends… go the spoils.

However, make no mistake. The distributed mashup of search and social is not new, nor is the notion of word of mouth circulation effecting brand “prominence.” SEO has always been social. From banks to beauty parlors, humans have always been recommendation “engines” propagating clues. It’s just that these days, it’s much easier for search engines to measure social and the sampling is finally enormous enough for databases of clues to be reliable.

Whether it was five women lawyers chattering between 1997 board meetings about how “cool” the new paper magazine is or 2,024,805 folks who like American Express on Facebook today, SEO has always been about word of mouth propagating brands. It should come as no surprise that as humans have flocked to social, search engines use the data to signal importance of content in SERPs. The new ecosystem of social media channels represents the human-sampled distribution channels of the day. Then or now, be it by little black book or PRWeb, keeping up to speed on distribution matters.

Looking To Part Two
The more SEO changes, the more it stays the same. Later this week, we’ll publish The Heart Of SEO: 8 Everlasting Truths Part-Two. Until then, happy optimization, and it’s great to be back!

iceteaimages – Fotolia.com

Booba o Kiki: de cómo inventamos nuestra experiencia de usuario

2011-07-08T07:25:27Z

Tenemos estás dos imágenes que tienen nombre propio. ¿Cuál es Booba y cuál es Kiki? Pausa para responder [...] Parece que en torno a un 90% de los lectores del blog habréis pensado que la figura naranja es Kiki y la violeta es Booba. Parece que este este test, desarrollado por Wolfgan Köhler, determina que la mayor parte de la gente, incluso independienteme de aspectos culturales aprendidos, respondemos de esa forma y que esto tiene que ver con cómo usamos los labios para pronunciar ambos nombres. Se trata de un comportamiento inconsciente que, sin embago, determina nuestra percepción.

En el plazo de una semana me he encontrado, junto a ese experimento, con otras dos fuentes de información independientes entre sí que me han hecho reflexionar sobre cómo inventamos nuestra experiencia de usuarios. Uno es un artículo de abril de Actualidad Económica que hablaba de la Teoría de las perspectivas y otro surge de un tuit de @torresburriel enlazando unas notas de Luke Wroblewski sobre una charla dada por Sarah Parmenter (¡!) sobre cómo la psicología afecta a cómo creemos que debe ser el diseño web.

Olvidemos por una vez los porqués

Cuando en algún taller o similar hablo sobre los tests A/B (que tratan de determinar qué diseño orientado a un objetivo es más eficaz para lograrlo), los asistentes muchas veces tratan de entender los porqués. ¿A qué se debe que si muevo el formulario de la derecha a la izquierda, aumente un 10% los usuarios que lo completan? ¿Cómo es posible que si en lugar de 4 botones naranjas, pongo 5 verdes, mis ventas aumenten un 88%? Yo soy el primero que está tentado de ir al origen y averiguar por qué.

Sin embargo, parece que en muchas ocasiones no existe un porqué dado que es el propio usuario quien no sabe explicar el porqué de su elección, ya que ésta no es racional. Muchas técnicas de neuromarketing exploran estas “lagunas de racionalidad” Pasamos de los resultados ciéntficios a los empíricos. Pero oye, ¡no está mal! Seguimos pudiendo medir, con no demasiado margen de error, qué es mejor para nuestros usuarios.

Favoreciendo la experiencia de usuario

Así pues, hay muchos casos en los que lo que es mejor para un usuario no es evidente. Por ello debemos favorecer la experiencia de usuario siguiendo un enfoque común y, posteriormente, evaluar cómo está siendo según lo que nosotros pensábamos. Uno de los enfoques que más me gusta habla de cómo crear usuarios apasionados. Al final es la misma historia de siempre, el storytelling, el hacerles que desarrollen una actividad que les estimule y les deje con la sensación de “soy un tío listo”.

Se trata de ponerles las cosas fáciles y que al mismo tiempo supongan un reto de muy fácil resolución. Un sitio o aplicación no es sencilla de usar (y por tanto potencialmente un éxito) por el hecho de cumplir una serie de estándare o recomendaciones. Algo es sencillo de usar si transmite esa sensación. Si los usuarios se llevan esa sensación al finalizar con éxito el objetivo que tenían cuando llegaron.

Y esa sensación ni siempre es racional ni, por supuesto, es igual para todo el mundo. Hay una diferencia entre simplicidad (algo subjetivo que depende de las aptitudes) y simplicidad percibida. Este mando de televisión convencional es igual de sencillo de usar que este otro. Sin embargo, el segundo es más simple. La percepción que tendrá la mayoría de los usuarios será mejor, irá en la línea de “esto lo han pensado para mí”

Evaluando que es gerundio

Es célebre el experimento que dice que cuando 7Up cambió el color de sus botellas al amarillo, un 15% de los usuarios afirmaban que el refresco les sabía más ácido. Los usuarios no somos totalmente racionales y, por tanto, nuestro comportamiento es, a veces, díficil de prever pero no tanto de evaluar.

Dadas las herramientas actuales para evaluar nuestros diseños y procesos, ningún proyecto que busque satisfacer al usuario (necesidad tanto más importante cuanto más comoditizado esté nuestro producto o servicio) puede prescindir de la evaluación constante que guíe y complemente el diseño “en libreta” de experiencias de usuario.

En un contexto en el que la información y estímulos (contenidos, publicidad…) a los que los usuarios estamos expuestos no deja de crecer y en el que nuestro cerebro se obstina en no tomar siempre decisiones racionales pero siempre las que más nos satisfacen, la evaluación constante de nuestros puntos de contacto con el usuario y cómo éste los percibe, parece un buen camino a seguir.

https://whichtestwon.com/archives/9977

Agency vs In-House vs Freelance SEO: The Endless Debate (starring Mr. Men)

2011-06-22T10:48:39Z

Posted by iPullRank

So you want a career in SEO? Or maybe you already have an SEO role and it's time for a change. Well, I've been doing SEO for five years now and I can safely say that I've endured the pros and cons of almost every type of SEO career situation. So let me give you some insight on the good, bad, and ugly for all of them.

What's an SEOMoz post without graphics? I'm partial to the Mr. Men characters by Roger Hargreaves, I tend to use them in my presentations to bring what I'm talking about to life. So let's meet the key players:

Mr. Persnickety – This is me. This is you. This is the SEO. You know your stuff very well, you come with case studies and analytics to make your points but it is essentially your job to tell people who have gone as far as to win awards in their capability that they are doing everything wrong. You are oftentimes the conductor of a cacophonic symphony – that's why you wear a bowtie.

Little Miss Stubborn –Will be playing various members of the defensive Creative Team (Copywriter, Art Director, Creative Director, Graphic Designer). They are very stuck in their ways and instead of building for SEO they'd rather try to retrofit SEO and effectively placing a band-aid over the mouth of an active volcano.

Mr. Lazy – Will be playing the part of the Tech Department or the Web Developer who most likely knows the right way to do things but likes to take a shortcut instead because they think you don't know enough to push back when they say they can't do something. Note to non-technical SEOs: LEARN HOW TO BUILD A WEBSITE!

Mr. Nonsense – Will be playing the Account Manager. Depending on the agency these guys usually don't have any idea what you do. They sell based on what the client is asking for rather than what you can actually provide. By definition it is their job to make the client happy which means you will be responsible for unreasonable requests that keep you at work until 10PM. These are the people that will make your life very very hard.

Mr. Fussy – This is your boss. This guy typically knows just enough about everything to be annoying. He'll drop buzzwords of the day out of context like “siloing” and “canonical redirect” because he follows Bruce Clay's blog and has never touched a site before in his life. He will also complain to you about things like utilization.

Mr. Impossible – Will be playing the client. He wants you wave your magic SEO wand and make his thin ad copy based content rank #1 for highly competitive terms. He wants you to drive conversions with landing pages that were clearly not optimized for conversion. He wants exact projections of when he can expect rankings. He doesn't care if you emailed 10,000 people he only sees that you only got seven links. He wants to dominate every position in the SERPs – today and he wants it all for as close to free as possible. After all Organic Search is "free" traffic, right?

Note: If I've worked with you in the past and you think I'm using these characters to personify you -- you're right.

Now that we got our key players, let's talk about the playing fields.

Agencies have the highest allure for digital. They make me think of scenes from "Who's the Boss" where Angela Bower ran her own Ad agency with the constant shuffle of people busy making the world turn. They make me think of the off-the-wall Creative ideas scribbled on whiteboards and the brand rooms that house their realizations. They make me think of drinking beer at my desk, and brainstorming meetings that birth viral campaigns so successful your friends send them to you rather than you having to beg them to watch in order to get your views up.

As far as SEO, agencies allow you to make your SEO success real for your friends and family. Up until about a month or so ago I could say "hey man Google 'sweaters.' Yep, I helped make that happen" because I worked on Ralph Lauren and they were #1 for sweaters in location-agnostic searches in March and April. Sure I could have already said that for [insert small company you never heard of here] but to be involved in brands that everyone is aware of is next level. In short, agencies are cool.

I separate agencies into two types. There are boutique agencies where SEO is the main focus and there are other capabilities that they support to facilitate SEO. These agencies can have any type of client from small to enterprise. Then there's what I'm going to call fully featured digital agencies. These agencies have a large department for every different capability. They are generally full of very smart people, there is a constant pipeline of Fortune 500 business and companies like Google fill their lobbies with branded ping pong tables and sofas to thank them for continuing to pump money through Adwords.

Overall Pros of Agencies:

People know their stuff – In an agency you are generally surrounded by people that are leaders in their field and are on the cutting edge of industry trends.
Diversity of Client Portfolio – In an agency you are not tied to one niche or one type of client so it doesn't get boring and the things you learn from one client you can apply to another.

Overall Cons of Agencies:

Employee Turnover – The average lifespan in my experience at agencies is about two years. This is because it's not hard to learn the next level's job and once you do it's not hard to convince another agency that you are worth more money. It's actually gotten so bad that holding companies have developed programs that allow you to bounce between agencies. So this is clearly not a con for an SEO's pocket however the work and client relationships do suffer.
Live and Die by Business Development – Depending on how the agency is set up if a client does not renew then that means a bunch of employees are getting laid off or there are no new hires and the agency has to contract and everyone has to do double duty. Unless of course you are upper management then you are mostly safe until there is some sort of merger.

Boutique Agency

My boutique agency experience is interesting and as I look at billboards and SEPTA bus ads for a local SEO agency or I see agencies that use their TopSEOs.com ranking as a selling point, I wonder how many people at boutique agencies are having the same experiences. Typically boutique SEO agencies are just that. While they may fill in the other capabilities around SEO as needed such as presentation layer and back end web development, a lot of them just focus on SEO.

I got my start in SEO at a boutique agency in 2006 as a technical analyst (read: web monkey). The place I worked at had some talent but we were basically an SEO chop shop. The owner got into it early somehow and built it into something big enough where he drove a Mercedes SL350 and lived in penthouse apartment downtown. Our production team was seven people at its largest. We had three Account Managers, three Technical Analysts, and an Art Director and about 50 small to mid-level clients. Our sales team was 15 people cold calling companies on an autodialer that scraped WHOIS records.

We were effectively the Walmart of SEO promising results and timeframes that were unrealistic. They'd taught me all I knew about SEO so I had no idea; I just kept on with the keyword stuffing and the hundreds of quick links across the bottom of the page and the bold and italics on every instance of the keyword. I had no idea that not redirecting non-www to www could lead to a duplicate content issue. Our link-building consisted of me spending hours searching for [keyword] + add url and posting links to anything I could find. Needless to say we rarely (if ever) delivered; clients blew up our phone daily and my then-boss never answered the phone which ultimately led to credit card charge backs.

Ultimately my boss got fired and I became the boss and I actually delivered to the best of my ability. That is the say the work they'd taught me to do I actually got done for our clients. I stayed as late as 10pm sometimes, I let clients call me at home and I hacked Zen Cart to make it easier for the client to input products. I worked my behind off and in the end even though I didn't know that we were doing 1999 SEO in 2006 I did know that the owner wasn't about delivering quality results for the clients so I'd had enough. Guys like him give our industry a bad name.

Granted my experience is not indicative of the experience to be had at reputable boutique agencies like SEER Interactive or Portent Interactive, so let's distill (no pun) it down to pros and cons that you may find in both cases.

Pros of Boutique Agencies

Familial Atmosphere– People are less about having an ego and more about getting the job done. It's essentially the startup "let's make it happen" ethos in which people are trying to pull their weight to build something successful. Your coworkers become more of a close-knit family that shares victories, has group lunches and pushes each other to be better.
Agility – Boutique agencies have the ability to stop on a dime, fail fast and adopt early. Who do you think is already implementing Schema.org markup and complaining about the two seconds Google's +1 adds to page load time? I'm going to guess it isn't R/GA.
Hands-On Approach – In my experience at larger SEO agencies we don't do any implementation which makes the process very annoying. However at the boutique agency we did all the implementations so we saw the results and could tweak as needed. I understand why but I sorely miss the ability to do that these days.

Cons of Boutique Agencies

Clients Expect the World for $5 – Clients are generally smaller for boutique agencies and if they are not smaller they expect to pay your company less because you're smaller. Despite that they still expect performance at the speed of light for such a low rate. They believe since they are paying you that they own you and your "little agency."
Team is Often Spread Thin – Your team is doing double duties because there are only five of you but there are a hundred clients to make sure your owner is making money. You're an account manager, copywriter, developer, and a short order cook. One of those balls you're juggling is going to fall. You should have juggled eggs instead so when they fall you finally have time to eat – multitasking!
Lack of Clout – You're not going to be visited by the Google fairy with branded basketballs and throw rugs. You aren't running $50 million through Adwords monthly, so you don't have a Google rep that gives you the exact numbers from the internal Adwords keyword tool. You're a civilian on the battlefield but at least you're MacGyver.

Full-featured Digital Agency

This is the primetime. My full-featured digital agency experience has been a fast-paced roller coaster full of impressive successes and disheartening setbacks. It's truly a challenge of wills because you are dealing with your stereotypical digital prima donnas but it is very exciting work so it's worth it.

I moved to a big agency after an in-house gig and was quite surprised by the fact that we just wrote about SEO best practices rather than implemented them and that we did so many menial tasks by hand. Truthfully the job felt kind of intimidating because I was surrounded by people who really got the results for highly competitive terms. In my interview they asked me "what would you do if a client was targeting an impossibly competitive term like 'tv'?" and I said something to the effect of "tell them to pick an easier keyword." These were the guys that could rank #1 for "tv" so all I wanted to do was learn from them.

It was a great learning experience; there were all types of awesome resources, coworkers bringing back great info and tools from conferences, great training sessions, discounts and free offerings from all types of places. Many times when I'd sign up for an API or inquire about software people were very receptive and went out of their way to be helpful due to what was behind the @ symbol in my email. In short, it was an incredible experience and I learned a lot from leaders in the field. After seven months of jedi SEO training I landed a gig at another agency where I now lead SEO.

These days I have a ton of meetings internally and with clients and it's hard to wrangle other capabilities into doing what needs to be done but when things align properly, I'm accomplishing SEO the right way on the big agency level the right way – or at least my way. It's a lot of work but it's oh so rewarding!

Pros of Full-featured Digital Agencies

Clientele – I like walking through the King of Prussia mall and being able to point at the different high end stores and say I do their SEO. The perks of working for these brands can be pretty incredible too; let's just say I don't pay retail for any home electronics or home appliances. The other cool thing from an SEO standpoint of working with big brands is that they generally already have a ton of links so you really get to see large scale ranking changes when you fix something simple.
Work with Rockstars – Adamanatium sharpens adamantium. You're surrounded by very smart people who have mastered something that you haven't had time to. The information sharing and friendly competition is going to make you better at what you do at an exponential rate. I was obviously a good SEO before I got my first big agency job but I learned more in three months at that job than I'd learned in the three years prior. Ok that's an exaggeration, but I learned a lot, yo!
Resources – You want training in Omniture? You want to go to MozCon? You need a million API calls monthly from the SEOMoz Site Intelligence API? You want search volume that's not to just three significant figures from Google? You want to go back to school? There's an app(lication) for that! Simply put, these guys generally have the resources to get you what you need to do what you want to do.
They Treat You Like An Adult – That's the way one of the Senior Analysts put it when I was interviewing for my first big agency job. You can work from home whenever you want, you have beer at your desk regularly and it's ok to curse when you're mad. Just be at work when you're needed and get the job done.
The Pay – My salary doubled when I moved from full-time in-house to full-time big agency.

Cons of Full-featured Digital Agencies

Multi-Agency Involvement – This never works simply because it's never in one agency's interest to help the other. For example when one agency has Paid Search and another has Organic, Paid can always dial up the results with more money and then throw Organic under the bus. Or if one agency is building the site and another is preparing SEO recommendations, the building agency could just never implemented the recommendations and then the SEO agency gets the blame.
Multi-capability involvement – Your Creative department hates you. Your Tech team hates you. Your Account team hates you. The Strategy & Analytics team gets along with you and you may never once talk to your Paid Search team. Why so much hate? Well you undermine everything that it is natural for them to do.
Your Creative team is thinking about the "golden mean," gridded layouts, widows, orphans and color schemes. If you are a true inbound marketer you're thinking about conversions, bounce rates and eye-tracking as well as SEO. So when you say "Let's A/B test the CTAs to see what messaging and sizing drives better conversions" Creative hears "let's open up the door to ruining the beautiful design that I just put into my portfolio."

Your Developers or Technical team think you're a hack. Rightfully so, in my opinion there are too many SEOs that cannot build a website. In that regard developers are movie producers and you are a film critic.

Your Account team generally has no idea what you do, they just know you are responsible for making the team miss launch dates. They barely knew how to sell SEO to begin with and really had no idea what they got themselves into. These people often refer to SEO work as "SEO Optimizations" and ask you "will this domain name affect the SEO quality score?" Uhh....What?

Strategy & Analytics thinks, "Yay! Here's someone that will actually put our data and insights into play." These guys will be your best friends in the agency world. They'll be interested in what you're doing they'll even come up with reasons for things that are happening that you wouldn't think of. I love the Strategy guys if only because they know enough math to turn that AOL CTR data into progressive forecast models.

Paid Search looks down their nose at you and says "Oh, you do SEO? That's cool. Good luck with all that link building. I'll be over here doing marketing with ROI that you can accurately forecast." As we all know an integrated search approach is the best way to go especially to test landing pages and to make those Paid Search dollars work the hardest. Even still Paid and Organic Search rarely pow wow.

No Direct Implementation – If your agency does do implementation it's most likely the web development or technical team that handles it. These guys don't want to be bothered. They assume that you don't understand what it takes to develop a website and that your knowledge of code is limited to whatever it is your favorite SEO tool told you to is out of whack. A lot of them even randomly know just enough about SEO to be dangerous to your cause. That is to say in 2003 they read a blog post or attended a panel discussion so they say things like "you worry about making sure the content has 4-7% keyword density, I'll worry about the code." I've learned that if I make a joke about multi-dimensional arrays in our first conversation they are a lot more open to me telling them to make changes to their JavaScript to account for Page Speed issues.

Corporate BS – There are very few big agencies that are not owned by WPP, Publicis Groupe, or some other holding company. This is great for your salary and benefits but people are laser-focused on bottom lines and corporate politics. Your super duper boss (your boss's boss's boss) will worry more about utilization and productivity numbers rather than the initiative you put forth by building something that helps you work faster. If you can't navigate the high school clique archetype that is our world, a big agency may not be for you.
SEO is an Afterthought – Aside from the fact that the other capabilities are not in your corner SEO is not the biggest money maker in the house. Typically SEO is sold in the SOW as the site being built with SEO best practices or if SEO has its own clients you're still not bringing in the money that a $10M site redesign is. That said you will most likely see the site as its going out the door and you will have trouble getting your optimizations in to the build. It will be up to you and your team to fight with Creative to make SEO work because people in the building aren't all that concerned with it. Creative is perfectly fine with building pretty cars with no engines and letting Media push it up a hill. Creative won't come running until the client is asking why their car is sliding back down the hill once Media is gone.

Let me be up front, I think in-house SEO is absolutely boring, so boring that when I did it I automated most of it while I focused more on deciphering Aesop Rock lyrics. However I also believe it's the most effective way for a company to accomplish its SEO goals. By definition in-house SEOs are experts in their niche and succeed because the effort is so focused.

Site Management

I worked for a company that did basement waterproofing, basement finishing, crawl space and foundation repair. We developed products and also had a lot of dealerships internationally so we developed and optimized the dealership sites for lead generation.

Yo, if I ever see another sump pump as long as I live....

Anyway, so I put the work we were doing in the shooting fish in a barrel category simply because we dominated a niche and focused on geotargeted keywords with very low competition. As you've probably guessed we were awesome at it. I was hired as the resident whiz kid because I had previous agency experience and before I bored myself out of it I'd offered a bunch of changes to their approach. We had to build a ton of sites that basically looked the same with different logos and color schemes and the biggest hold up was generally that our two copywriters would have to "scuff" up existing content, updating it for the service area. Truthfully, the copy was as good as it was going to get so what I did to speed this process up was have them write four versions of each page with the same number of sentences in such a way that sentence one in version A made sense with sentence two in version B and so on. I also had them leave in markers for towns, cities, states and dealer names. Then basically I wrote a script that randomized the lines and positions where it would place the variables, then it checked how close it was to previously generated versions and it wouldn't spit out copy unless it was 90% original. Not quite your typical content spinner and to date I haven't heard of that content getting penalized or not ranking #1.

It's probably pretty obvious that I went after generating sites and generating dynamic service area landing pages next because I was bored. I guess that is part of why in-house SEO works so well, you have to keep experimenting to keep yourself from losing your mind working on the same thing.

I learned a lot here too and worked with a lot of talented people, but I also learned I needed to work at a digital agency where innovation is expected and not looked at as risky voodoo.

Pros of Site Management

Full Control – This can be the same setup as the full featured digital agency where your company has a bunch of different capabilities that handle different parts of the site. However being that the company is so invested in SEO you are most likely touching the site directly yourself or at least working directly with a development team that is forced to follow your direction. When I was in-house we were the "Web Team" and while we had an Art Director, Flash guy, a couple copywriters, a link builder and a PPC guy the rest of us were Web Specialists which meant we were responsible for building and optimizing the sites. This is the best place to be in because you can do anything as needed. There's no writing about what needs to be done, presenting it, and then hoping a third party implements it. It's done right the first time because YOU did it.
Knowledge of Niche – This is why every company that is focusing on SEO should bring it in-house. When you optimize for one industry you really begin to master it, know the key players and the best ways to get links and develop content. The goals of the brand have been embedded into your DNA and it is easier for you to apply them to your overall efforts. Your universe is small but you are the master of it.

Cons of Site Management

Scared of Risk – Brands generally don't understand SEO but they do understand the New York Times. As we all know SEO has a bad reputation for backfiring on big brands so they don't want to do anything that Bruce Clay wouldn't like. That said if you are someone that follows the blogs and is really up on the newest techniques you may get a lot of push back from your boss about applying any tactics that are not vetted by Mr. Clay. Sidebar: I'm sorry Bruce, you're probably great at what you do but your work has been the cited by the people that have caused me many headaches in my career so you tend to end up in a lot of my SEO punch lines. No hard feelings man.
Company is Not Knowledgeable – Oftentimes when someone has the brilliant idea to build an in-house SEO team they don't fully understand that SEO is typically a long-term initiative. They also don't communicate it to the guys upstairs and further don't understand that Landing Page and Conversion Optimization are large parts of that process. So what happens is the people upstairs cleared your hiring and then they expect you to work magic on their failed websites in very short time periods. Basically the expectations are often not managed and you don't really have any control over it. Then your boss starts leaning on you because his boss has turned up the heat. Expect to have to educate the people above you when you get there.

Agency Management

Redundancy is certainly the American way because a lot of companies are hiring in-house SEOs and then subsequently hiring third party agencies to develop their SEO strategy, content and link profiles. I guess the point is for the company to have someone on their side that speaks the language and can verify the work. Good grief! If these companies just want to waste some money make all checks payable to Michael King, I always wanted to buy a Knight Rider car but only sit in it inside of a Mack truck.

I don't have any experience with being an in-house SEO that manages an agency relationship. I'd love to hear about some experiences in the comments below.

I imagine it's similar to my dealings with third party agencies in other roles though so that's what I'm going to base this set of pros and cons on.

Pros of Agency Management

It's Easy – You have agencies laying out your strategy, you're just QAing it and making sure that it fits your brand guidelines and overseeing the implementation on your side. So it's basically reading some documents, passing them along then double checking if the work was done. I don't even understand why companies hire an SEO for this anyone that can read can do this.

Cons of Agency Management

Condescension from the Agency – You're the in-house SEO, you couldn't possibly be on the cutting edge of things like an agency -- or so they think. You think the agency is pompous, the agency thinks you're stupid and getting in the way of the implementation of their strategy. They will blame any failures on you and take full credit for any victories. I know because I've seen it and I do it.

Those of us who have done anything on a freelance basis know that it's the most bipolar of them all. In this case I don't mean contracting for an agency as an employee without benefits; I mean working as an independent consultant.

I've done freelance work since I was a teenager in both web and software development (in fact I think Jamie Stevens and I did a freelance site together back in 1995) but lately it's been mostly about SEO for companies, other agencies and individuals. I've been a touring musician for about eight years so this was the ideal situation for me to supplement my income while on the road and clients have come in all shapes and sizes. Some were very cool, easygoing and helpful while others were absolutely insane, unrealistic and unreasonable.

A lot of clients tend to see SEO as a quick fix and don't understand all the moving parts so client education is absolutely paramount when you do freelance work. Then there are the people that don't believe you can do what you say and will often stand in the way of their own success. Sometimes clients come to you because they didn't like how the results of working with a boutique agency went and they think working with an individual is a better idea.

What I love most now about freelance is that is keeps me sharp. This is often the opportunity where I get to implement optimizations myself and test out the new ideas I'm having or that I'm hearing about on the SEO blogosphere.

Writing about SEO is mostly conjecture; my freelance work is what keeps my SEO skill set relevant.

Pros of Freelance SEO

Freedom – You choose your clientele and make your own schedule. In an agency it's not your call whether to dump a problem client; at best you can get transferred to another account. When you do freelance you can avoid or fire problem clients.Obviously you and your client must agree on dates for deliverables but if all you do is freelance work then you get to wake up at 3pm and optimize whenever you feel like it. I've optimized whole sites on flights to Europe, got off the plane uploaded and then performed a concert. File under: awesome.
Autonomy – You call the shots! Sure you have to work within the brand guidelines and client goals but aside from that there's no one dictating your strategy. When you have a great idea for link building or want to build a tool to take advantage of something that applies to the client's niche there is no boss telling you not to.

Cons of Freelance SEO

Everyone wants a package deal – Before we even talk goals or keywords most potential freelance clients first just ask me how much would SEO cost for their site. The conversation usually ends at "it depends" but the fact of the matter is that it does depend on a variety of factors. While I know some industry leaders like Danny Dover (in "Search Engine Optimization Secrets") have suggested that SEO prices should be standardized based on the task with a multiplier applied based on experience, I strongly disagree. I price my work based on an hourly rate multiplied by the amount of hours I've scoped for the tasks or project. Even still people would much rather hear what my silver, gold, and platinum packages are. Man this ain't the car wash or McDonald's I can't get you the works for $15 or an Extra Value Optimization.
Lack of Client Education – Typically freelance clientele is small businesses referred to you by a friend or even big business that doesn't want deal with the headaches of an agency. These people have heard the term SEO thrown around and their knowledge often stops at Meta tags. The biggest part of any freelance job in my experience is client education, I spend more time writing emails and making calls about what I'm doing and why than actually doing it. That's not to say that SEO education is not a big problem within agencies and amongst their clients as well, but you personally won't spend as much time educating clients in those roles.
Ebb and Flow of Work – Peaks and valleys. Feast or famine. No matter how well you network it tends that you will have a time where you have too much on your plate followed by a time when you wonder when you're next job is coming in. Being that most of my freelance clients are small businesses, I've found it difficult on a freelance basis to get clients to sign on for continued optimizations. They typically want some sort of "one and done" situation or just a small amount of monthly link building. The best situation to get around this ebb and flow is to partner with a boutique web design shop that doesn't have SEO on staff and help them out.

I'm having too much fun with the Mr. Men meets Dilbert cartoons so I figured it might be a fun guessing game for me to post more memories and have people guess in the comments where they happened. I'll give you guys the answers after we get enough comments.

Obviously this comes from a bias lens and I've been around the block enough times to know I am the big agency type but I hope people find this insightful so they don't go into any of these scenarios blindly. Also keep in mind these are insights from my experience so you may go into any of these scenarios and never run into these problems. Just like anything in life, every opportunity is what you make of it.

I want to hear from you guys. Those of you with multiple experiences I'd like to know what scenario you think the best. Have I left out any glaring pros or cons? I especially want to hear from people who have worked in-house managing an agency relationship.

Thank you to all the people that I have worked with who can laugh at this post because they know they were awesome and they were nothing like the archetypes I have just described. Hope you guys have enjoyed my first post!

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The ImportXML Guide for Google Docs

2011-06-24T13:40:55Z

The Importxml guide for Google Docs has been written to primarily empower SEOs, SEMs and digital professionals across the world to create their own tools. Inspiration, innovation and all around ingenuity can be attributed to the talented engineers at Google for bringing us this invaluable service. Next time you speak to a Googler, show them some love.

This guide is suitable for absolute beginners to the most diabolically clever coders that will no doubt expand on what they learn here. Below you’ll find the trailer video for the full video guide to Google Docs by none other than Tom Critchlow on Appsumo. Enough talk, let’s get it on…

Chapter 1 – Prerequisites – How to look at source code and interpret HTML
Chapter 2 – Introduction to Xpath
Chapter 3 – I’m ready – What’s ImportXML and why should I use it?
Chapter 4 – Your first ImportXML lesson

Chapter 5 – Advanced ImportXML
Chapter 6 – Your first Google Docs script with ImportXML

Chapter 7 – Advanced scripts and API magic
Chapter 8 – Regular Expressions and data extraction
Chapter 9 – Efficiently lightening the load on the spreadsheet

Chapter 1 – Prerequisites

First things first, go get yourself a Google account. Secondly, if you haven’t used Google Docs and specifically Google spreadsheets you’ll need to take the tour and familarize yourself. If you’re already an Excel user, you’ll be right at home – hurry up we’re waiting!

Great, now we’ll need to make sure you can read some source code. In this instance we’re talking about HTML markup that your browser needs to bring those beautiful websites to life.

Try it! Right click on this web page and choose view source.

Don’t get scared, and more importantly DO NOT give up now

Funnily enough this will all make perfect sense to you in a bit, trust us you’ll love it. What you’re seeing up there is mostly HTML markup which is how web pages are built.

If you want to become an expert on HTML visit this introduction at W3 Schools

If you want a quick and dirty explanation, stick with me.

HTML isn’t exactly programming, rather it’s a markup language made up of tags. The tags are surrounded by angle brackets < > and come in pairs – one to open and another to close ( We add a forward slash to close like this: </ >. Think of writing a quote in text “You would always open up the quote by using apostrophes, but the end must come as well so we close them by adding some more”

Try it! Take your mouse and rest it on the tab of the current page you’re on. You should see something like this:

That information is actually stored in an HTML tag called <title>. In the source code for Unicef you will see <title>Children’s charity | Protecting children’s rights | UNICEF UK</title>

Try doing this right now with a live test

*Notice how the second title tag is closed using the / slash. There are many tags which you’ll need to reference in your quest for importing data, so use this cheat sheet to help you.

Chapter 2 – Introduction to Importxml: Exploring Xpath

Great, you made it! Now that we’re familiar with HTML and such, we’re going to learn how to import some of that data using Google Docs Spreadsheets. Before we do, we’ll need to learn some XPATH first.

Xpath (simple definition): A query language used to pick out pieces of information from web pages.

If you want to become an expert on Xpath, get back to W3 and start the introduction.

Or we’ll take you through another quick and dirty explanation here.

To get you through quickly, we’re going to explain only what you need to know for ImportXML - Parents and Children.

For the following example we’re going to use:

<div> Starring as “the parent”, <p> as “aww the cute child” and co-starring is: “Plain old text” as himself.

<div>

<p>Plain old text</p>

</div>

So we’ve got our stars and now we want to pluck out “Plain old text” as he hasn’t been performing to his best these days.

To do this using Xpath we would write: //p

Ok so you might not get it, let’s get some information from the Godfather (specific to Google Docs):

// – this means select all elements of the type
//h3 – this means select all h3 elements (or etc..)
[@class=''] – this means only select those elements that meet the criteria given – Example: look for H1
//h3[@class='storytitle'] – this means only select elements that look like:h3 class=”storytitle”Title/h3

Chapter 3 – Why should I care about using ImportXML?

Well you’ve come this far and it’s fair that we tell you. ImportXML allows you to import data from web pages directly into your Google Docs Spreadsheet. It’s like magic! We can now look at a page, decide what information we want by looking in the source code, finding the HTML element and by using Xpath we can dig it out.

ImportXML is how we’re going to pull it in. So why exactly should you care about it?

Instead of copying and pasting information from a bunch of websites, this is will do it in 2.2 seconds.
It automatically pulls it into a spreasheet so you can work with your data however you want.

If you’re a trader, you can automatically pull in all your stocks into one spreadsheet effortlessly.
If you’re an SEO, you can acquire 100′s of link targets from around the web.
If you’re an online retailer, check up on your competitor’s pricing for Product XYZ as soon as it changes!

It is truly endless, and only limited by your imagination….and um Google. Have we convinced you? OK come on let’s get to the first lesson!

Chapter 4 – Your first ImportXML lesson

You’ve got 2 options: You can watch a quick video we made below or continue past the video to get hands on straight away.

The hands on approach: We’re getting used to the code, so let’s go ahead and step through a practical example. A common SEO task is “how can I find as many blogs in specific niches as possible”.

Performing a a quick search turns up with a site listing 100 blogs like this: http://www.onlineschools.org/2009/10/27/100-best-book-blogs-for-kids-tweens-and-teens/. It’s manual and time consuming having to click on each one to copy the link. I want to get the list of URLs into a spreadsheet as quick as possible.

1) First we take a look at the source code of the page and we see something like this:

You can see that all of the blogs are in the li element. Make a mental note!

2) Now fire up your G docs spreadsheet and add the URL in cell A1: http://www.onlineschools.org/2009/10/27/100-best-book-blogs-for-kids-tweens-and-teens

We can see that all the blogs are a separate li element so let’s try something like

=importxml(A1,"//li")

(where A1 is the cell with the URL of the page). We get this back:

3) As you can see, it contains the blog names so we’re getting there. But our query is also getting a whole load of other stuff we don’t want. So let’s look in the code and see if we can isolate the list of blog items. I find the “inspect element” control in Google Chrome excellent for visualising this. As you hover over the code, it highlights the section of the page that applies to it.

4) We refine our guess to limit ourselves to the div with class ‘intro-box-wide’ using a query like

=importxml(A1,"//div[@class='intro-box-wide']//li")

Which loosely translated says “get the div tag with that class (intro-box-wide) and then select all li (list) elements within it” which results in:

5) We’re nearly there! We now have a list of all the blog elements. The next step is to pull the URL. So we modify our function to be:

=importxml(A1,"//div[@class='intro-box-wide']//li/a/@href")

Which says, from the li elements select the href contents from the a element. This /a/@href is a very common thing to tag on the end of importxml functions so I suggest you memorise it. This results in:

And we’re done! Have a look at the Google Docs spreadsheet go here and make a copy then you can play around to your heart’s content

Chapter 5 – Advanced ImportXML

Ok, now we have the basics down let’s move on. You might have seen the next section, as it’s been detailed by Tom Critchlow in a different post. I’m going to help explain the genius behind his rank tracking – try and keep up. This is a common task that we might want to do so let’s quickly discuss how to do that. Firstly we construct the search URL like this:

="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=US&q="&a2

Let’s break this down a bit shall we?

We’re going to get data from google, so naturally we have http://www.google.com/
Next is /search? – this means we’re pulling up the search results page
We add in hl=en which is the language code. EN=english
gl=US is helping us get United States Results, for UK we would use gl=UK
q= is your search query ex. cool places in london, cats etc…
Optional: You can specify the number of results by adding &num=20 or =50,=100
Most importantly, this URL looks like a formula because he adds the =. Also, he adds ” because this is essentially telling G docs that anything in the ” ” is text. When the text finishes he adds the cell reference &a2. Why? This way you can type your next query in A2 and not have to modify the URL again

Ok back to Tom:Then we parse the Google URL using importxml like this:

=importxml(C2,"//h3[@class='r']/a/@href")

I’m not going to break that down, hopefully you can figure out what I’m getting off the page (Psst – he’s taking all the links from the listings). Again, check the source code for the page if you’re not sure what to write in your importxml function. Output like this:

As before, Grab your own copy here.

Of course, since this is a common function we might want to roll it into a single cell like this:

=ArrayFormula(MATCH(1, FIND(“http://www.distilled.net”,importxml(concatenate(“http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=”&A2&”&pws=0&gl=UK&num=50″),”//h3[@class='r']/a/@href”)),0))

I was going to add some explanation here as to what this formula does but actually it gets pretty complicated. Either you already know what an arrayformula does (in which case it should be straightforward) or you don’t. In which case you probably just want to copy and paste for now

I should note at this stage that there is a limit for 50 importxml calls per spreadsheet which limits us from building a full web crawler but for most agile tools this is sufficient.

Cool, so now we have a bunch of moving parts let’s start combining things. Here’s a spreadsheet where you enter a keyword, 4 location variants and a domain and it gives you the ranking position for all the keywords that search suggest spits out for that domain. Nifty.

As always, have a poke around with the Google Doc to understand what’s happening.

Chapter 6 – Your first Google Docs script with ImportXML

Welcome to your first script in Google Docs. If you’re a beginner you’ll probably want to head to Google Apps and try your first script.

Or, get your hands dirty right away with a very simple tutorial…

Script (simple definition): A set of instructions where Google docs will execute and return values, perform actions etc..

What coding language does Google docs script use? In simple terms, it’s a “bastardized” version of Javascript – tutorials here.

We’re going to walk you through a very basic script that puts a a value into a cell. Wooohoo, let’s go!

1) Fire up the old G docs spreadsheet, click on Tools > Script Editor

2) The easiest way to explain the function name is to relate it to something you already know. Any formula in Excel ex. =SUM is a function. This will work the same way if we need it to.

3) First thing we need to do is define the current spreadsheet. Google has already pre-made this:

SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSheet();

That’s pretty long and I don’t feel like typing it out every time. Let’s put it in a box (real name is a variable) and let’s call this box “sheet”. Much nicer name don’t you think?

var sheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSheet();

4) Alright, now let’s try and put something in a cell. You’ll have to do 2 things here: Tell the script which cell you want to put things in and what you want to put in. To “get” the cell we use: .getRange() and to put something in, we use .setValue(). Notice the uppercase letters, they’re important! Ok let’s put it all together:

sheet.getRange("b3").setValue("Hi there!");

5) Ok, the moment of truth – put all of this in the script and it should look like this:

function myFunction() {

var sheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSheet();

  sheet.getRange("b3").setValue("hi there");

6) Press the play button and just save the script as it comes. Now go back to your spreadsheet, what do you see?

Well done!

Chapter 7 – Advanced scripts and API magic

Let’s combine the magic of ImportXML + APIs + Google scripts to make some seriously cool tools. For the following example we put Tom Anthony in a cage until he made us a Twitter followers scraper. We wanted to know how many crazy people actually followed him on Twitter using scripting magic.

As always, have a poke around with the Google Doc to understand what’s happening.

The only cell that needs user input is A2 – which is his twitter handle. The rest of the magic happens behind the GO button. Here is your step by step:

1) Select Tools from top menu > Script Editor

2) Copy and paste in the script below. Anything with “//” in front of it is a comment and isn’t required to make the script run.

function loadImport()
{
// This variable, ‘ss’, will store a reference to the Spreadsheet.
var ss = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSpreadsheet();
// And ‘sheet’ will store the Sheet.
var sheet = ss.getActiveSheet();

// In more complex scenarios we may want to be referencing different
// sheets or even different spreadsheets. Normally though, the above
// will be what you want.

// Get a reference to the A2 Cell, where the URL has been placed.
var cellreference = sheet.getRange(“A2″);

// Now we use getValue() to get the URL stored in that cell.
var url = cellreference.getValue();

// Now join that url onto the API URL.
var apistring = “http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/followers/” + url + “.xml?cursor=-1″;

// Now build our importxml() command
var command = “importxml(\”" + apistring + “\”, \”//users_list/users/user/screen_name\”)”;

// Now we want to reset our reference and point it to the target cell
var cellreference = sheet.getRange(“B2″);

// Now we put the forumla into the cell and it will pull in some followers for us! Woo!
cellreference.setFormula(command);

}

See the line that begins with var command= ? This is a bit tricky, he’s basically trying to formulate this ImportXML call: =importxml(“http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/followers/tomanthonyseo.xml?cursor=-1″, “//users_list/users/user/screen_name”)

The only problem is that when he’s trying to put in the Xpath like so:
\”//users_list/users/user/screen_name\” it looks kinda funny. Look at the start of this line: \” – Why is that there? Google will assume the quotations are needed to run this script, but really all we want to do is make this regular text in a cell. To make sure Google doesn’t execute the quotes, we use \ (regex) to escape the proceeding character.

3) Save the script!

4) Go to the Insert Menu and choose drawing

Yep, we’re going to make us a shiny button. Draw away friends and when you’re done we need you to right click on your button and “assign script”

In this instance it’s going to be called loadImport. That’s it, you’re done

Chapter 8 – Regular Expressions and data extraction

ImportXML and meta data seem to disagree. I’m sure you’ve tried helplessly trying to get meta descriptions from different web pages with fruitless results.

Ladies and Gentlemen, there is an answer and it’s not ImportXML but Importdata and Regex.

Importdata is a function in Google docs that allows you to import the entire source code of a webpage directly into the spreadsheet. Here’s how it works:

=Importdata(“http://www.example.com”) < Simply call the function and ensure the URL is between the quotes and parentheses and you're done.

It’s taken over my entire spreadsheet!!?? No sweat, just wrap it in the concatenate function like this:
=Concatenate(Importdata(“http://www.example.com”))

There are a few Regex functions available to you in Gdocs, but for the sake of this tutorial we’ll be working with =Regexreplace(text, regular expression, replace)

We strongly advise you to read about Regex and test your skillz.

However, we’ll break down the following formula to save you the pain of importing meta descriptions…this time

In order to pull out meta descriptions from a web page you need to first Importdata then reference that cell with this formula:

=REGEXREPLACE(Importdata cell,”(.*)(meta name=.description. content=.)(.*?)(\x22)(.*)”,”$3″)

As always, have a poke around with the Google Doc to understand what’s happening.

Chapter 9 – Efficiently lightening the load on the spreadsheet

You might have the most complex super duper Google docs spreadsheet, but it’s soooo slow. How do we speed this thing up?

Store formulas in scripts
Use script triggers (buttons) to populate cells with formulas
Hide the cells that you don’t need to see. Trust us, it works
Incorporate “clear” functions – all you need to do is set “” values in cells for each set of importXML calls, this helps with clearing out old data and formulas that have gone wrong

As we find more speed fixes we’ll continue to update this section.

Pre-Made Toys

This is a collection of free tools made by the folks at Distilled, friends, and other very talented people who have shared their tools with us.

Have one you’d like to submit? Tweet @dsottimano, or add it in the comments below and I’ll be happy to look at it!

Tom Critchlow

David Sottimano

Tom Anthony

Linkscape API + Competitor Analysis

Resources & Further Learning

Reference

Blog Posts

Google Docs Unleashed video training
How to build agile tools using Google docs
Build a web page monitor with Google docs
Overcoming Caching with Importxml
Playing with ImportXML
Linkscape API + ImportXML for SEO competitor analysis
Tracking Social Media Strategy with Google Docs
Link Prospecting with G Docs, Twitter and APIs
The smartest user on G docs forum I’ve ever seen: Ahab

Special Thank-you’s

A very special thank you goes to the guy who mentored me: Tom Critchlow. Another thank you goes to Tom Anthony for helping me hack tools together everyday at the office. They have both generously contributed to this guide and it wouldn’t have been possible without them. Also, I <3 Distilled.

FAQ

We need more questions folks, feel free to submit as comments!

Q: How can I add a pause or sleep function in Google Docs with ImportXML? A: There is a function in Google scripts called utilities.sleep and will allow you to pause for a maximum of 5000 milliseconds

10 Terrible Tweet Types Killing Your Twitter Strategy

2011-05-18T15:00:30Z

[This is a guest post from Rohin Guha of Blue Phoenix Media. I met up with Rohin a few months back while in town for SES New York where we discussed pop culture, the days of Live Journal and the grammar mistakes that make our skin crawl. We are now linked for life. Today, Rohin stops by to talk about some dangerous tweet types killing your marketing strategy.]

Once upon a time, we all failed at Twitter. And I’m not talking about failing to get influencers to retweet us. Though, most of us failed at that to. But what I mean is that we all initially failed at using Twitter properly as a brand-building tool.

Like mankind is known to do, we learned to make lemonade. We learned that with the onset of Twitter, branding had become a didactic process. Through handpicked tweets, the impetus had now fallen on companies to teach prospective clients and customers how to regard them. Useful links, smart engagement, and genuine conversation taught end users that you were a steady, reliable, intriguing brand worthy of their business. In managing @bluephoenixnyc for Blue Phoenix Media, my approach focuses on engaging the affiliate marketing community while building bridges out to broader segments of internet culture. But my approach also considers this: There are no wrong leads. It’s an ambitious goal, but ultimately rewarding.

For those companies (be they SMBs or big Bs) not too well-versed with social media awareness, or who simply don’t have the manpower to oversee it, such ambition can lead to bad habits that, over time, can grow into brand-killers. So the onus is on you to protect your brand.

Below are ten such brand-killers and ways how beef up your own Twitter strategy.

1. Talking-Heads Tweets.

Whether we’re going to conferences or just partaking in a universal event (the Royal Wedding comes to mind!), hashtags are a way for tweeters of a feather to stick together. But many well-intentioned hashtag-driven sub-communities frequently become a gallery of talking-heads. Have you read George Saunders’ “Braindead Megaphone”? If not, please do. Because that’s what hashtag-driven sub-communities become when everybody is talking at once–and to nobody in particular. It’s a brand development dead end.

Fix: Stop shouting. Have a conversation and engage. Talk about the conference you’re at, the Royal Wedding livestream, the American Idol results show. Branding does not have to be in-your-face self-promotion. It just has to be humanizing.

2. Auto-Tweets.

Automated tweets are worse than spambots. They’re instant brand killers. It’s the Twitter version of receiving a form letter for users who have just recently followed you: “Hi @USER! Thanks for following me! Check out http://dumblink.com/barf.html!” More importantly, it’s a shoddy way to try to convert new followers into leads. By generating auto-DMs, you risk losing followers. Scheduled tweets, alternately, aren’t so universally terrible, but still require awareness and discretion. Case in point: When the world learned about Osama bin Laden’s death from the President, many big brands—like Lady Gaga—had scheduled tweets go live, to unintentional comic effect. Another unfortunate deployment of a scheduled tweet? The PATH train’s Mother’s Day well-wishes that went live about an hour after one of its trains had crashed and injured over 30 passengers.

Fix: Keep it real. Disable the automator. Deploy scheduled tweets with discretion. Go the extra mile when necessary and delete them if the context becomes irrelevant.

3. Sandwich Tweets.

We all hate Sandwich Tweets. A Sandwich Tweet is exactly as it sounds. It’s a tweet a user contributes to the effect of, “Eatin’ a sandwich!” It’s devoid of substance. From a personal perspective, it provides no opportunity for further chatter; from a professional perspective, it provides many opportunities to be reviled and mocked.

Fix: If it’s the best sandwich of your entire life, by all means, tweet so. Then tell us what it is. Then tell us where we can get it. In other words: Give us the delicious details. Then give your favorite deli some props by driving some more business to them.

4. Troll Tweets.

This isn’t about gnarled old men tweeting aggressively from underneath bridges. It’s about people who pollute the Twitter ecosystem by lobbing nasty messages into the ether. It’s not that Twitter should become a beacon of the “new niceness” that has suddenly become web chic. But it should remain a productive place to socialize, both personally and professionally. Troll tweets do neither. However, they do one thing remarkably well: Shut down all productive conversation. Let’s look at one of Twitter’s best-known trolls in its short history: Chris Brown. With his angry tweets, Brown has quickly become a bête noire of Twitter. And while he can still sell records with such an indelible mark on his brand, the rest of us can’t—sell records or anything really. The answer here is simple…

Fix: Be nice or become a B2B bête noire.

5. Copycat Tweets.

There are users who perhaps haven’t mapped out their branding strategy. Or they don’t want to. Whatever their reasoning, they’ve decided that instead of original content, they’ll just clog up the ecosystem by retweeting everything an industry or thought leader says, no matter how banal. The problem with this approach? It never amounts into anything more than a watered-down aggregator. You’re existing in the shadows of industry towers instead of standing out.

Fix: Stand out. Be opinionated and original. Don’t be afraid to be wrong. If someone calls you out on it, you can civilly discuss your perspective and hey! you may even earn a few followers in the process.

6. NSFW Tweets.

The evolution of business palaver is curious at best. We’re suddenly in the era of too-casual oversharing—and it’s a bewildering era. Kenneth Cole can insensitively seize a tragedy and still enjoy steady revenue! But we’re not all up-scale peddlers of khaki pants and button-ups. Also bear in mind that there is such a thing as too far: Remember when Chrysler fired that guy for accidentally insulting a broad swath of its market share? We might be too-casual, but we’re still professionals. That means: Watch your language, demonstrate a modicum of respect, and if you want to share dirty jokes, do it off-the-record and off-the-clock, so you don’t implicate your brand. Unlike a personal brand, a corporate brand is much slower to recover from colossal social media failures. Chrysler is probably still recoiling from its Twitter debacle.

Fix: Decency and discretion.

7. Billboard Tweets.

If you’re a SMB and you’re not cut from the same fashionable cloth that fancy start-ups in Silicon Valley (or its petite East Coast sister Silicon Alley) are, awareness is going to be a very up-hill battle. But don’t mistake that challenge for an opportunity to use Twitter as another channel to spin out alternating advertisements. Unlike TV or most websites that rely on display ads, Twitter’s opt-in engagement makes it so about 101% of the burden falls on the brand to entice users, not the other way around. 101% because the best and successful brands are already putting in 100%.

Fix: Just like blogging has made SMBs responsible to establish themselves as original thought leaders, Twitter now challenges SMBs to do the same…in a lot less space. It’s about content, people.

8. Tone-deaf Tweets.

An important thing about Twitter is tone. Don’t use one that would have other companies regard you as one of the millions of #Beliebers. While cutesy tones might work for Kim Kardashian or my personal favorite, The Office star Mindy Kaling, they’re both showbiz personalities. You’re an internet marketer and even Kim Kardashian sticks to what she knows best on Twitter: Shilling shady products. And if she were to go off-message and suddenly talk about keyword densities, her brand value would depreciate astronomically. By the same virtue, don’t forgo tone entirely—that’s worse. No one will notice you if your tweets lack flair and have all the appeal of slowly-peeling paint.

Fix: Know your limits. Stick to a smart, consistent tone.

9. Vacuum Tweets.

Questions are a great way to perk up your Twitter mix. They show that you’re looking to solicit feedback from your followers and anyone else listening in. But in abundance, it just kills your strategy. An abundance (as in 95% of your tweets) of questions waves a flag to the effect of: “Oh! We know nothing! We don’t know what to say! Do our job for us!” Inexperienced is a word that no brand wants stalking them like a stray cat. That’s exactly what a company too-frequently posing broad questions in a bid for user engagement risks.

Fix: Don’t suck up the conversation. Instead, create it. Engage users not by baiting them, but by inspiring them to react.

10. Eavesdropping Tweets.

So you know how you hate it when you and a friend are talking about how awesome something—like chess sets—are? Both of you are like, “Man! Wooden chess sets rule!” Then a third person mysteriously appears and says, “Wooden chess sets are endangering forests. Forests are essential and I’m about explain why even though the way both of you are furrowing your brows indicate waning interest. “Well, Twitter users hate it when your brand becomes that third person. You could argue that they should DM one another if such a conversation was truly private. But it’s not up to you to dictate the terms of the conversation between two other people. It is up to you to mind your boundaries. Just because they’re high-profile tweeters doesn’t give third parties carte blanche to interrupt—unless it’s for a very good reason. As Jenna Maroney once said on 30 Rock: “Respect celebrity privacy.”

Fix: Boundaries. Never cavalierly break into a conversation between two other people on Twitter—unless there’s a gem truly worth sharing.

Mind you, this is by no means a Twitter gospel to brand development. These are merely basic rules worth learning. Because Twitter’s like (is?) life: You have to learn the rules before you learn how to break them. Remember: Baby steps before big kid strides.

Mastering Google Analytics Custom Variables

2011-05-18T12:39:43Z

I’ve got a stack of posts that I want to write, and realized that the all deal with Custom Variables. So, to make sure that we’re all on the same page when it comes to custom vars, here’s my guide to Mastering Google Analytics Custom Variables.

For those of you that have not used custom variables, CVs are a way for you to insert custom data into Google Analytics. What kid of custom data? Almost any kind of data. As long as the data is available to you in the source code of a web page you can pass it to Google Analytics via a custom variable.

There are 4 parts to a custom variable:

1. The name of the variable
2. The values for each variable
3. The index or slot of the variable and the scope of the variable
4. The scope of the variable

Name & Value

Custom variables are name-value pairs of data. The name is also called the “key”. To create a custom variable you define the name of a custom variable, like Favorite Baseball Team, and then assign it different values, Red Sox, Braves, Giants, etc.

Google Analytics will show you a list of all the custom variable names in a list and then let you drill down into the list and see all of the values.

Here’s an example. I use a custom var named “Year” to track the publication year for all my posts on this blog. I can view which year had the most popular content by finding “Year” in the Visitors > Demographic > Custom Variables report.

Then I can click on “Year” to a get a list of all the values:

Custom variables can also be used in custom reports and advanced segments. The name of the custom variable becomes the “Key” dimension and the value of the custom variable becomes the “Custom Variable Value” dimension.

Index or Slot

The index is a way to organize your custom variables. Index is also referred to as “slot”. At a basic level, you get 5 custom variables. But this can actually be misleading. Think of the index as a parking lot with 5 parking space. You can put or “park” a custom variable in each space.

You can technically have more than 5 custom variables, but we need to discuss the next concept, scope, and how it impacts the index.

Scope

The key to mastering custom variables is understanding the scope. The scope of a custom variables determine how long the custom variable will persist.

If we use the parking lot analogy, the scope determines how long a car will stay parked in the custom variable parking lot.

There are three different scopes for Google Analytics Custom Variables:

Page Level: A page level custom variable will only persist for as the visitor is viewing the page where the custom variable has been set. Once the visitor moves to a new page the custom variable will expire.

Visit Level: A visit level custom variable will persist for the visitor’s entire visit. Once the visit ends the custom variable will expire.

Visitor Level: A visitor level custom variable will persist for 24 months as a cookie on the visitor’s machine until the visitor deleted her cookies.

Where scope really gets complicated is when we use it with the index. Remember, you have 5 slots that can hold a custom variable. Once you place a custom var in a slot that SLOT BECOMES FILLED and you can not place another custom var into the slot.

Scope and index work in tandem to determine how many custom variables you have available at any given time.

Let’s start with a visitor level custom variable.

When you place a visitor level custom var in a slot that slot remains filled until you delete the custom var. Remember a visitor level var is stored as a cookie so you have to actually delete the cookie. So, if you set a visitor scoped custom variable in slot 1 you can NEVER use slot one again. Unless you want to erase the custom var you set in slot 1.

Every time the visitor comes back to your website slot 1 will be filled because there is a cookie (named __utmv) on the visitor machine.

PARKING ANALOGY: There is a car in parking space 1. The car has no tires… and no engine… it’s not going anywhere soon… unless it gets towed.

When you create a visit level custom variable and place it in a slot, that slot remains full for the entire visit. Once the visit ends that slot opens up and you can place another variable in that slot.

Unlike the visitor scope custom variable there is no cookie. So when the visitor comes back to your site that slot is open.

PARKING ANALOGY: There is a car in a parking space 1, but just for the day. The spot will be vacated at the end of the day and someone else can park there.

When you create a page level custom variable and place it in a slot that slot remains filled until the visitor moves to another page. Once the visitor moves to another page the slot opens up and you can place another variable in the slot.

PARKING ANALOGY: There is a car in a parking space 1, but someone is just running into a store. The engine is idling and the spot will open up in 5 minutes.

Let’s look at a couple of examples:

Example 1: A visitor on a news site logs in. I set 5 visitor scoped custom variables. This means that whenever the visitor comes back to the website ALL five slots are filled. I can never use any other custom variables unless I erase or over-write one of the existing variables.

Example 2: A visitor is on a blog. Each blog post is categorized 3 ways using a page level custom variable. on every page I set the same 3 custom variables. When a visitor logs in I set a visitor custom variable to identify them as a member. So now I have 3 page level variables and one visitor level variable. The slot that contains the visitor level variable will always remain full, so I need to make sure that I always place my page level variables in the same slots.

Example 3: A visitor logs into a news site. I set 5 page level custom variables when they log in to record various pieces of information about their membership. One the next page I fire of 5 different custom variables to record information about their past browsing history. In this senario I have actually set 10 custom variables. How? Because they are all page level custom variables. The slots associated with a page level custom var open up when the visitor moves to a new page.

Hopefully this explains how you can technically have more than 5 custom variables.

The Code

Like everything else in Google Analytics, you implement Custom Variables using JavaScript. All of the topics we discussed above, index, name, value and scope, are all part of the JavaScript.

Here’s the standard Async code snippet:

_gaq.push('_setCustomVar',index,'name','value', scope);

The index is a number, from 1 through 5.

The scope is also a number. A value of 1 indicates a visitor scoped custom variable, a value of 2 indicates a visit level custom variable, and a value of 3 indicates a page level custom variable.

The name and the value are just plain text. Whatever you enter into the code above will be pulled into Google Analytics.

Where do you put this code? That’s the hard part. You place this code when you want to create a custom variable. You may want to categorize all of the pages on your site using a page level custom variable. In this case you might place the custom var code in the standard GA code snippet, like this:

<script type="text/javascript">// <![CDATA[ var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXXX-1']); _gaq.push(['_setCustomVar',1,'PageCategory','Sports', 3]); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

(function() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })();
// ]]>
</script>

Or, if you’re going to identify someone as a ‘member’ of your site, you might place the code on a page after the visitor logs in. Like this:

<script type="text/javascript">// <![CDATA[ var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXXX-1']); _gaq.push(['_setCustomVar',1,'VisitorType','Member', 1]); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

But you can also attach the code to visitor action, like onClick events.

You can also create custom variables for mobile devices using the iOS SDK and the Android SDK. How cool is that!

And some of the super nerds I work with at Cardinal Path have been able to hack custom variables and set them using the Google Analytics Mobile Tracking code for low-end mobile devices.

Regardless of the platform that you’re tracking, you can probably use a custom variable.

Super Nerd Stuff

Custom variables are not without their limitations and oddities. Here are a few things you need to be aware of when implementing:

1. What happens if you place a custom variable in a slot that is already filled? The last value placed in the slot is applied to the visit.

2. Custom variables are sent to Google using the same invisible image request. In the old days (ie two months ago) the size of this request was limited to 2048 characters by the browser. Because this limitation can really restrict data collection, Google decided to limit the size of your custom variable. This means that the name – value combination must be less than 64 characters. I know, this sucks.

BUT, Google has since changed how it collects data. The size of the image request is now 8000 + characters. So, in theory, Google could kill the 64 character CV limit. But they have not…

~~3. Custom Variable processing lags the standard data processing by about 24 hours. However, if you add a custom variable to a custom report it will be visible. I know, completely weird.~~ This is really only for very, very big sites, where data processing can lag in general.

4. Page level custom variables are more-or-less the same as an event. When you create an Advanced Segment using a page-level custom variable, GA will return the number of visits that included that custom var. So, if you don’t have enough slots available you may want to consider using an event.

5. When you set a custom variable the data is sent immediately back to Google Analytics via an image request. This means that if you set a custom variable, on the last page of a visit and AFTER the pageview is recorded, that custom variable will NOT be collected by Google Analytics. If you can, put your custom variable code BEFORE _trackPageview().

That’s ALL I have to say about custom variables. Hopefully this gives you a good baseline understanding of how they work and how to implement them.

If you’re using custom variables leave a comment. I’d love to hear how you’re using them.

Mastering Google Analytics Custom Variables is a post from: Analytics Talk by Justin Cutroni

Finding Fresh Linkers: Quick Linkfromdomain Hack

2011-05-26T18:52:55Z

Prospecting for bloggers in a niche is common practice in link building. One quick way to do this is to search for queries like “top <keyword> blogs” to find curated lists of blogs. For example, a search for “top SEO blogs” will give you this top list of SEO blogs. The problem is that this list is dated (2007) and this is no longer an accurate representation of the best and most active bloggers in this niche. I know this because I’m active in SEO, but I might not know this when researching a new niche.

I was thinking of a quick scalable way to get some type of metric to judge fresh linkers. A way to differentiate from blogs like Ontolo that are currently active linkers from blogs like Stuntdubl, which have archives full of gold, but are no longer active linkers.

I came up with a quick little hack to get a vague metric.

Step 1: Linkfromdomain on Bing

This search operator from Bing returns pages that are link-to from a domain. Will wrote a link building post on linkfromdomain on SEOmoz.

The problem is that it doesn’t give any temporal information.

Step 2: Date Filters

A regular search on Bing will provide a date filter on the side bar.

When this filter is used, it adds a parmater in the URL:

&tbs=qdr:d – Shows pages updated in last day
&tbs=qdr:w – Shows pages updated in last week
&tbs=qdr:m – Shows pages updated in last month

Step 3: Simple Hack

You can copy these parameters into the URL string for a linkfromdomain search in Bing.

For example, this search will show the pages Ontolo has linked to that have updated in the last month. You’ll quickly notice it doesn’t show links created in the last 30 days, but it shows you pages that updated in the last 30 days. This generally includes new pages or blog homepages.This hack lets you see sites that link to fresh content.

Step 4: The Metric

Up at the top of the results, you see the number of results which can be used as a rough metric to compare sites. I don’t think it’s a strong metric, but if you’re attempting to prioritize outreach in a scalable way, it’s one additional data point to use to sort out prospective link sources.

Step 5: Scale

To scale this, we need to create an agile tool to grab this data. This can be done in a Google docs spreadsheet. I recommend reading Tom’s post on how to do this.

This metric can be pulled off the results page using importxml and XPath.

=NOEXPAND(importxml(B2,”//span[@id='count']“))

I put together a quick proof of concept:

This isn’t perfect, but sites like seorefugee.com, seoblackhat.com,and stuntdubl.com get relatively lower scores, while sites like SEOmoz.org, MarketingPilgrim.com, and SearchEngineLand.com get relatively higher scores. I think the metric is most useful in the extremes.

I hope this quick little hack helps you scale your outreach. I’m a big fan of building little agile tools and leveraging existing tools to improve efficiency. If you’re interested in link building, you should follow me on Twitter and come by my session at SMX Advanced.

Measuring SEO Performance

2011-04-25T07:00:00Z

Visitors, Unique Visitors, Page Views, Average Time On Site, Bounces, Pages Receiving Organic Traffic, Keywords Per Landing Page, Long tail, Rankings, Backlinks? Sorry I don't buy it.

"You can't see the forest for the trees" situation here in my opinion. After reading quite a lot of articles about the topic that's my attempt to face measuring SEO performance in a scientific manner. Nothing spectacular but I like simple things that work great, I like to start from scratch after set aside everything learned previously.

Reasons why you should measure your SEO efforts? Answer with another question, does anybody have to tell you?

Observe user behaviour

Overwhelmed with so many metrics, dimensions, numbers, and charts in your web analytics tool? Get the head out of it, two steps back, a sip of a good espresso and perspective becomes very different.

What are the typical user behaviour patterns from search engines to goal completion or transaction? Not rocket science here:

Visits bouncing
Visits not bouncing not converting
Visits not bouncing and converting

Image speaks for itself

Objective of SEO

At this stage of the twentieth century we should not be wasting time discussing what the objective of SEO is but you can still see articles talking about keywords rankings, volume of traffic as the sole purposes of this art, science or whatever you want to call the way we make a living.

'Pure SEO is not about conversions' Ouch! Go tell the client paying good money that you are not there to increase their benefits, if you have guts.

'Purists' against 'modern SEOs'? A nice topic for a bit of link bait but again, we are paid for a very clear purpose, the rest is cheap chit chat or plain scam.

Yes, of course some other disciplines like Conversion Rate Optimization are relevant to increase the number of visitors achieving a goal, especially at the end of the funnel, but CRO is going to play in the benefit of any medium bringing traffic to your door, not only organic one.

Social media campaigns have relative impact in organic branded traffic, hard to measure as any other branded medium but nor CRO neither SM or any other are excuses to forget about conversions in SEO.

The objective of SEO is to bring to your site the maximum amount of non-paid converting traffic.

Interlude: No goals or e-commerce set up? Fix that and come back later.

Following the example of the previous picture this is what we work hard for:

Increase total amount of visits
Decrease visits bouncing
Decrease 'not bouncing not converting' visits
Increase 'not bouncing and converting' visits

In top of those three tasks if you also manage to increase revenue per converting visit, transactional sites obviously, then you are my SEO guru, not those "I-write-some-fancy-WP-plugins" title contenders.

Now we have a good perspective of how things are going in general terms it is much easier to:

Present in a silver crystal clear way how good you are as SEO consultant to your clients or audience
Drill down to diagnose effectiveness and improve it having relevant objectives in a more scientific procedure. Please, no more unorganized nonsense collections of metrics

SEO performance in 3 charts

I confess, I'm becoming a dashboard-aholic. Business objectives and KPIs defined first and then a good dashboard picturing them. It saves a lot of time going back and forth across your web analytics favourite tool reports. Only when some outliers need more analysis I come back to GA (mostly, I hate Torture SiteCataclysm).

So I tried to figure out the simplest dashboard for SEO performance evaluation and this is the result.

The one and only important chart

Client: Is the revenue coming from organic increasing? How much? That's the chart answering these questions so is the most important one. Note the visits from organic have a discrete trend line in the background, just to bring some context.

Only a chart for visits would make you think, "poor boy, his SEO is a shame" but the revenue shows a complete different history: "woohoo, this guy rocks!"

Performance chart

Getting a bit more into the interesting details, this chart shows the rate of quality visits from organic, the ones converting and how much money they spend per (converting) visit in their transactions.

In other words, how many visits we are moving towards the third bucket.

Entrance chart

Having a clear vision of what is happening at the beginning of the funnel is important for us as consultants, not so for the client. Did they come to your door for nothing? Visits and bounce rate.

The more the bounce rate is decreased more quality visits are moved to the second bucket.

The all in one measuring performance chart

A different type of reportlet, a combination of percentages and trending arrows.

Not complicated, just comparing month over moth the changes in volume in the three buckets plus a forth arrow on the right to show trend in revenue per visit.

← ← Red, money and visits are running away, pretty bad
→ ← Light red, although the bounces are decreasing the converting ones too, a bit worse than next one because althoug you are keeping the people in the house, money is flying away
← → Light green, some of the 'non-bouncing not-converting' are escaping towards the bouncing visits, not good, but at least a portion of them are now converting, not so bad
→ → Green, moving visits from the beginning of the funnel towards conversion. Good
→ → ↑ Super Green, same then previous but also increasing revenue per visit

Ups and downs are part of this business, having some mediocre months from time to time is not something to scare you. Having several greens in a row demonstrates you are good or excellent. Finally you can't call yourself a SEO if reds last several months.

Now you can really check where in the scale from pure-crap-SEO to super-guru you are.

No metrics yet?

Ok, ok, you are right, time to add your favourite metrics to your SEO magic but always keeping in mind our scientific procedure.

From visits to conversion, decreasing bouncing traffic comes first. Pretty straightforward, what we know about these guys? The keywords they queried and landing pages they ended up from organic. 'fix and measure' mantra here.

If your SEO is good you will be moving visits from the first bucket to the second what mean more people likely to convert.

Second step, moving visits from the bucket of the 'not bouncing not converting' to the converting ones but now go on your own amigo, this is about measuring, not about telling you how to do it.

Don't forget seasonality or other external factors that might confuse you a bit like farmer pandas or any other delights search engines will have ready for you.

Well, in fact this measurement framework could be applied to any medium but SEO is what we discuss here. Again, you are free to tweak it if you have non-transactional goals or if you want other traffic mediums reflected there.

SEO Performance Dashboard

I'll make it easy for you. Feel free to download the SEO Performance Dashboard for e-commerce sites. A single click will tell your qualification, who said fear?.

NextAnalytics plugin for Excel is required to make this dashboard work. Buy it or download free demo here http://excel.nextanalytics.com. (Disclaimer: I don't get any money for this, I already paid my license. I do it because it is a tool I use daily, I like it and the support they offer is insuperable).

I hope you like my approach, constructive criticism is always welcome.

*All the charts and figures in this article are coming from the same real live site, no fake numbers here.

Link Building: Link Context and Anchor Text Optimisation

2011-05-12T13:37:57Z

When it comes to link building one of the most important aspects of it is the optimisation of the actual link. Whether getting the link voluntarily or by contacting webmasters, you have to exert the utmost influence on the link itself. Unfortunately this is also a Catch 22.

When you start controlling the appearance of your link it stops being a natural link.

Thus Google can use filters on such a link to determine it’s ”manufactured”.

So there is a really volatile relationship between links being natural and useful for SEO. Most successful SEO techniques have been abused in the past by spammers so that Google tweaks its algo to curb overtly artificial link building.

Examples of such devalued links are:

Reciprocal links
Footer links
Site-wide links
Off-topic links
Exact match anchor text links.

None of these tactics is by itself ”evil”. It’s just their overuse that leads to penalties. Indeed I was reviewing one of my favorite SEO companies to find all of these techniques used in a fairly legitimate way and indeed combined. Let me explain:

Reciprocal links: This SEO company linked to its clients in their case studies and the clients linked back to them.

Footer links: The client sites were linking to them in their footers as it was “who built the site” info nobody expected to see in the content itself.

Site-wide links: Because the footer was added to every single page on the site, the footer links were site-wide, adding up to dozens, hundreds or even thousands

Off-topic links: A fashion or car website linking to a web design and SEO agency is not really a relevant context.

Exact match anchor text links: As the company has built the clients’ sites as a whole, most of the clients had a typical “web design by x” link added where web design was the actual anchor text.

So you see all these techniques by themselves are quite natural; many websites link their web designers like this. Combined, these links look very artificial though. Spammy paid links look very similar in many cases.

Let us return for a while to the concept of a healthy natural link profile. You do not want just each link to be of SEO benefit. You also want to have a healthy natural link profile as a whole. Such a profile is including nofollow and scraper links. An abnormal link profile raises a red flag for the Google algo.

You might get penalised for perceived paid or low quality links without even having them. Depending on the industry, niche or even language of your site, a healthy link profile might look different. So it does not make sense to create another faulty ”keyword density” that allows you to find the perfect numbers for each one link type.

One again it’s common sense that will guide you through the link context and anchor text optimisation. Let me show you the advice I had for this particular colleague of mine:

Add context

Write a post or at least a short paragraph about yourself, or let your clients introduce you on their blog or site. Do not just add the link. Introduce the site you are linking to.

Add branding

Do not only link the generic text as in ”web design”. Link to ”web design by x” or ”thank you to our web designers from x”. Insert your brand for x.

Make it readable

Do not hide the link and its context in the footer or somewhere where nobody will read it. Let them proclaim it right there where we can see and read it. After all, they like your services, don’t they?

Less is more

Linking to you on 2000 pages does not make sense in many cases. One laser targeted page may bring even more leads. Search engines like Google can count links of course, and group them together so that 2000 links from one site is not much better than just one or two.

Treat each link as an individual

Do not use a template or require your link partners always to link in a certain manner. Ask them to include your brand and services, and let them do it themselves or suggest a way that’s appropriate for each site.

Now you could argue that all these link optimisation techniques work only when you actually engage in artificial link building by contacting other webmasters. You can apply the same rules to link bait as well. People are lazy, especially on the Web, so that they share and link in a quick and dirty way.

The title, headline and first sentence or paragraph of the linked-to page will often be the text used to link to you.

Also, typical linkbait techniques like badges, widgets, infographics or downloads can by their very nature be only displayed in certain places and contexts.

Thus you can influence the outcome of your link baiting efforts by creating a badge that is small enough to fit in the sidebar but big enough not to be placed in the footer. Infographics often include an embed code. You could even run a script that randomly chooses one from several anchor text options.

Aside from the technical aspects, Google displays a tendency of trusting brands more and more over the years, so that focusing on generic keyword rich anchor texts is probably the most widely overused SEO techniques nowadays. It might still work; even the other outdated SEO practices mentioned above have all worked in the past. It’s far easier to influence a link when it is put up on a page than trying to fix it afterwards.

Also, don’t change everything at once when fixing your links and anchor texts and adapting to a newer algorithm. It’s pretty certain that link history and stability is taken into account as well, so that links that appear and disappear potentially raise another red flag. Your natural link profile does not change overnight. It grows and withers organically. Don’t hurry when applying changes. Otherwise you might look like a spammer to the indifferent bots.

* Image by Oceanik.

5 Tips for Google Social Search Optimization

2011-05-05T18:10:01Z

Google Social Search

Google first introduced Social Search in 2009 as an initiative to highlight content for users that was both relevant and personalized based on public content from their social circle. Since then, Google has continually updated Social Search to meet the increasing shift in user behavior toward social networking. In recent months, Google has started integrating this Social Search data with social annotations alongside search results; extended the social networks where they’re pulling this data to include sites like Quora, Flickr and Google Reader; and now, Google has just launched their very own social sharing button, Google +1.

Why bother with Social Search optimization?

While at first it was unclear as to how much Google planned to invest in Social Search and whether the search engine would eventually incorporate these social signals into their ranking algorithm, the rapid evolution of this now prominent feature on Google’s SERPs confirms that Google’s Social Search is becoming deeply integrated within Google. For example, while Social Search results originally only showed up for users at the bottom of page, with Google’s latest updates, results containing social context have the potential to rank in any position on page 1. With major implications like this one, and many more which we’ll detail below, Social Search introduces a new optimization strategy SEOs can’t afford to ignore and is yet another indication of the convergence of social media and SEO.

Note: Bing’s also looking to social signals as indicators of search relevancy, but the focus of this post is specific to Google Social Search.

5 Optimization Tips for Google Social Search

Diversify your social channels. Google’s scraping for social signals from a wide range of networks. Leverage several networks versus just one or two, and be sure to focus on channels Google’s actually looking to for signals, like Twitter, Facebook, Quora, Flickr, Google Buzz, Google Reader and YouTube. If your content is being shared across multiple sources, Google may also see your content as more valuable due to its broad reach.
Treat tweets and Facebook updates like on-page SEO. Many people fall into the trap of trying to use a different type of messaging across their social networks that’s irrelevant and misaligned with their brand and overall company message. Just as you would optimize your website page, use keywords that are relevant to the content you’re sharing via tweets and Facebook status updates. Additionally, be sure to align your Twitter bios and Facebook Info tabs with your website’s “About Us” messaging.
Make sure your Facebook Page is publicly viewable. Google and Bing can only crawl pages that are viewable by ‘Everyone.’ Check your Page’s settings and make sure your content and updates are visible to the general public.
It’s not just about content; engagement matters. Retweets and Shares aren’t enough. Don’t just use your social channels to push content to your followers; ask questions, answer questions and facilitate conversation. Just adding social sharing buttons to your blog post pages isn’t enough. Google’s interested in more than just sharing–they’re looking at social relationships, too.
Measurement is key. Just because you think a topic is engaging and will attract a lot of social sharing, doesn’t mean it will. Trust the data, not just your intuition. Make sure you’re measuring your social media efforts. Once you find out what kind of content really resonates with your followers/fans/readers, make sure to build content that meets that demand. If your content isn’t generating engagement, then you’re not going to derive value from Google Social Search. Metrics to consider might include for your blog: page views, subscribers and comments. In terms of social sharing, track retweets, @mentions, Likes, comments and Shares.

Share your own tips

While we’ve included a list of tips above that we view to be significant in optimizing for Google Social Search, this is in no way an all-inclusive list. Are there any Social Search optimization strategies that you’ve tried and seen success from? Share them with us.

5 Tips for Google Social Search Optimization is a post from: B2B Marketing and Lead Generation | Optify

Public Relations & SEO: Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks

2011-04-27T19:35:09Z

OK, PR pros, it’s confession time. How many of you have clients that have asked, “Why aren’t we showing up in Google Alerts?” Or how about this gem: “We started a blog, but no one’s reading it. What should we do?” If you were like me several years ago, you probably responded with some shifty non-answer like, “Google Alerts don’t matter; they don’t result in more sales,” or, “Your readership will grow with time.” Is this a not-in-my-job-description situation or a sign it’s time to get back in the classroom?

Those are extreme examples, but they illustrate a problem in the public-relations industry. PR increasingly involves online tactics, but many PR pros are still approaching it from an old-school mentality. They proclaim that this is all stuff they know how to do; the only difference is it’s online instead of in print. If you’re one of the stubborn ones, or freely admit you’ve got a lot to learn, you’re in the right place. Welcome to the first installment of our series PR & Online Marketing: Navigating the Conflux. In this post, we’ll explain why PR pros should give a hoot about online marketing. We’ll cover the role of search in the sales cycle, and end with a preview of several SEM-meets-PR tactics to whet your wondering whistle.

The alchemy of online marketing is conversions—a fancy word for a desired action such as a purchase, enrollment, request for information, and the like. PR pros need to think about strategy from an online marketing perspective because, ultimately, the goal of any PR program is to increase or prevent a decrease in conversions, typically sales, but also registrations, sign-ups, etc. To support the sales effort, think about how people buy. Let’s look at an über-simplified version of the sales cycle:

Awareness: A potential customer learns about a product/service/opportunity.
Interest: The potential customer seeks more information about the product/service/opportunity.
Purchase: The customer buys/joins/enrolls.

At the awareness stage, the potential customer might learn of a product in a number of ways:

Word-of-mouth (friend, family, co-worker, etc.)
Salesperson/someone in-the-know
Advertisement
Direct mail (catalog, flyer, etc.)
News coverage
Social community
Search (customer searches for a solution to a problem)

At the interest stage, the potential customer might seek more information by:

Searching online/visiting provider’s website
Asking a current customer/user/owner
Researching in-person (looking at product packaging at store, asking salesperson for more information, etc.)

Then y’all know what happens at the purchase stage.

PR executives, at least the ones I’ve worked with, have many a tactic up their sleeves for increasing awareness. Most are awesome at generating news coverage, and many are great (or getting better) at social media involvement. But they typically fall short in the interest stage, specifically the search component. Some PR folks would argue that’s not in their job description, that it’s the SEO firm’s responsibility. But guess what: The content that customers find in search results? Yeah, that’s your job. Would you trust anyone else to write that stuff?

Search is important for consumers to evaluate a potential purchase. Think about the last significant purchase you made—a car, LASIK, maybe a hotel reservation. Chances are, you researched online for reviews, recommendations, photos, options, packages, sales, brochures, specifications, etc. Considering the Internet’s role in consumer purchasing behavior, it would be negligent to go about PR sans search, right? Glad I convinced you.

Incorporating search into PR isn’t really a step-by-step process (save for the initial step). But to boil it down, everything you do needs to be optimized, which starts with keyword research. The posts in this series will explore some of the ways PR pros can start thinking like an SEO. For example, are you pursuing search and contextual coverage? Developing a content marketing program? Exploring PPC for PR? Including web analytics in your measurement?

Before we get ahead of ourselves, we should start from the very beginning: keyword research for PR! That’s the topic of our next installment, coming atcha next week. Until then, ciao!

Photo credit: ggjsmith

Is Content Curation the New Community Builder?

2011-05-03T10:00:02Z

Content curation has drawn my interest. I was at a tech conference last week and saw a couple of pretty cool applications for curating content. Setting a side the debate of right or wrong, these new content curation tools will make their mark. Content curation, which involves human filtering and organizing is much different than content aggregation. Content aggregation sites use algorithms to find and link to content. Content curation is the practice of human filtering and organizing what you find interesting and useful.

Over a year ago Mashable reported Why Content Curation Is Here To Stay;

The debate pits creators against curators, asking big questions about the rules and ethical questions around content aggregation. It turns out that lots of smart and passionate people are taking sides and voicing their opinions.

Content aggregation (the automated gathering of links) can be seen on sites like Google News. Overall, this type of aggregation has been seen as a positive thing for content creators and publishers, and up until very recently, it was left to technology. Content creation, meanwhile, was a human effort.

But all that changes with curation — the act of human editors adding their work to the machines that gather, organize and filter content.

“Curation comes up when search stops working,” says author and NYU Professor Clay Shirky. But it’s more than a human-powered filter. “Curation comes up when people realize that it isn’t just about information seeking, it’s also about synchronizing a community.”

Part of the reason that human curation is so critical is simply the vast number of people who are now making and sharing media. “Everyone is a media outlet”, says Shirky. “The point of everyone being a media outlet is really not at all complicated. It just means that we can all put things out in the public view now.”

Media Curation is the emerging trend toward integrating and pondering media content using a mix of machine and human resources. The practice includes Aggregation (gathering) and Curation (sorting, categorizing, art directing, and presenting) such that material from multiple sources creates a unique editorial experience for readers/visitors.

Media Curation is a complex subject among media professionals, with notable professionals both for and against the practice. Mark Cuban, a well known owner of media properties and sports teams has said that media Aggregators are “vampires” and content creators that don’t ban these so-called vampires are “showing their neck” and likely to have their lifeblood sucked try. Cuban is not alone in this position, many media companies including Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp have taken a stance against content aggregation and curation.

But just as passionate are an emerging class of new publications and editors like Arianna Huffington of The Huffington Post and Michael Arrington of TechCrunch. Arrington says Agregators are supporting readers, and business models have to evolve. New companies and services have developed like Pearltrees.

The large and unwieldy volume of content being created and pushed to public space on the web overwhelm individual web browsers. Machines have been able to manage this volume with improved search solutions, and human data input from user tagging, friend recommendations, popularity sites like Digg and Stumble Upon and others have provided discovery alternatives. But content consumers, readers and viewers, also require contextual relevance and aesthetic sorting. So sites like Mediaite.com that gather and organize media news and gossip for media professionals and industry observers arrive to provide a filter that is both quickly aggregated and human filtered.

Fred Wilson, well known venture capitalist and blogger (avc.com) wrote a post that clarifies the changing landscape for publishers on his blog.

“If I was starting The Village Voice today, I would not print anything. I would not hire a ton of writers. I would build a website and a mobile app (or two or three). I would hire a Publisher and a few salespeople. I would hire an editor and a few journalists. And then I’d go out and find every blog, twitter, facebook, flickr, youtube, and other social media feed out there that is related to downtown NYC and I would pull it all into an aggregation system where my editor and journalists could cull through the posts coming in, curate them, and then publish them.”

So, Where are you with this? The world is changing, and with that no one really owns anything anymore. The old model is broken, isn’t it time to move on and embrace these new tools. The value will be in the expertise of the curator, people will not read junk, and the best of the best curators will create digital domination with vibrant communities.

A Marketer’s Guide to Content Curation (hubspot.com)
The Future of Media: Storify and the Curatorial Instinct (gigaom.com)
Content curation: Is it strategic syndication or simply saturation? (prsa.org)
Content curation means Quality through the essential human touch (liberatemedia.com)
What exactly is ‘Curation’ anyway? (publicsphere.typepad.com)

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